Overgod

Overgod

Overgod is a free old school Shoot 'em up game for Windows, Mac OS X and recently, Linux. It was developed by Linley Henzell in the programming language C based on the game programming library Allegro. It is released as free software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).

The player's ship, of which there are several to choose from, flies in 360 degrees of rotation as seen from a top-down perspective. It can be customized by picking up various colour-cycling power-ups that give different bonuses. The game emphasizes simplicity in graphics and gameplay. Therefore, as a side effect, it has quite low system requirements – a 300 MHz Pentium processor and no special graphics chip are considered plenty.

Contents

History

The game Lacewing that was released in 2006 may be seen as a predecessor.[1][2] Overgod was released in 2008 for DOS and Windows 95. It was then brought to Linux with the help of Michael Faerber and to Mac OS X with help from Peter Hull.

Game elements

Ships

Each ship has a special ability different from the others. One fires an extra set of darts backwards, while another recharges its hull strength over time.

Power-ups

Each Power-up is signified by the color and shape. The color signifies which power will be upgraded (for instance, yellow is the primary weapon), and the shape determines in which way (Circles increase number of darts fired at a single time).

Yellow Symbols – Primary Weapon
Square
makes your darts fire more often.
Circle
lets you fire extra darts, which do half the damage of your main darts.
Triangle
makes your darts fly faster.
Green Symbols – Thrusters
Square
increases main thrust, but also adds extra drag while you are accelerating.
Circle
lets you turn more quickly.
Triangle
increases main thrust by a little bit, and also reduces drag all the time.
Red Symbols – Secondary Weapon
Square
increases the damage by about a third.
Circle
increases the number of times your weapon fires or the number of submunitions it produces, depending on which weapon you have.
Triangle
generally increases speed and range, and may affect duration. Increases the destructive radius of exploding weapons.
Blue Symbols – Shields and Armour
Square
adds armour to the outside of your vehicle. You can see how much armour you have by looking at the bottom left of the screen.
Circle
lets your vehicle generate a protective shield.
Triangle
increases the rate at which your shield restores itself.

Special Modes

Purple Mode

all spinning symbols appear purple. The colors rotate as normal, but you cannot see them. You can only tell what color a bonus is when you already have five of that bonus and therefore cannot pick it up.

Night mode

hides some visual elements and removes the mini map.

God mode

prefers to send larger enemies at you

References

  1. ^ http://freegamer.blogspot.com/2009/07/berusky-overgod-and-allegro.html
  2. ^ webpage of Lacewing

External links


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