KUIPER

Far out past the frigid orbit of Pluto, fight for life's most precious resource.

*Work in progress*

Please read the Missing Features and Bugs sections down below to get an idea of what stage of development the game is in.

*Chrome Users*

Sadly an export issue with the Godot engine prevents the game from running in browser on the Chrome (and likely any Chromium-based) web browser. Please try running on another browser (i.e. Firefox), or wait for the downloadable version of the game. Thanks for your patience.

Lore

Out past the orbit of Pluto there ain't much but rock, ice, and very little energy. So little that the inhabitants have found it more practical to build with ice than with metals like back on Earth and Mars. Years in isolation refining their techniques have allowed them to build structures around those weak sheet metal spacecrafts of theirs in a mere seconds, pulling ice directly out of the asteroids themselves--or dirty snowballs they call 'em--and crystallizing it around their fragile space vessels for protection. They're nothing without their ice shells, but good luck getting past that!

Mechanics

In Kuiper you pilot a fragile spacecraft that can be destroyed with only a single blaster shot to the hull. Your only defense is to use your ice harvester to build a crystalline shell of H20 around your fragile center. Fire upon asteroids to release their frigid contents, and your harvester will gravitate the freed water ice particles towards your ship so they crystallize just outside of your hull. But that ice shell is brittle, and won't deflect attacks forever. You must maintain a constant balance between rebuilding your ice shell and fighting off your opponent in order to best them and avoid becoming an icy husk in the frigid void of the Kuiper Belt.

Controls

Action	Player 1 Controls	Player 2 Controls
Fly Up	W	Up Arrow / 8 Numpad
Fly Down	S	Down Arrow / 2 Numpad
Fly Left	A	Left Arrow / 4 Numpad
Fly Right	D	Right Arrow / 6 Numpad
Full Stop	Space bar	Ctrl / 0 Numpad
Fire Blaster	RMB (device 0)	RMB (device 1)
Toggle Player 2	;	;

Missing Features

• Projectiles striking a ship does not do anything (i.e. game over screen/points).
• The ice shield is not yet implemented: ice particles collides with the player's aura, but do nothing. This is the core game element that sets it apart from other top-down space shooters, so expect it to come soon, and different iterations to be experimented with.
• Other modules than just the pea shooter. Hoping to add a shock wave blast next that's more effective at harvesting ice for your shield.
• Cool down for the ice harvester. Right now whenever an ice particle is shot free, it just flies to the nearest player ship.
• Gamepad controller support.
• Start menu.
• AI to play against.
• Graphics overhaul.

Bugs

• Player 1 and 2 read input from the same mouse.
• Asteroids do not update their center of mass when their shapes change. This leads to spinning asteroids with a center of rotation outside of their area, and other wonky looking physics.
• Only the central chunk of asteroids collides with the player ships, and not the outer chunks.
• Bisected asteroids continue moving as a single rigid body. Need to implement a split function.

Thanks for taking the time to check out this very early stage project. I welcome comments! I plan to keep releasing new and improved versions of Kuiper very soon, so stay tuned!