Introducting Omega Arena
After the cancellation of Gridblaster II I immediately started working on a new project. I have done some serious work on the prototype and now I finally have something to show off. Behold: Omega Arena! Since this is a prototype, it looks very, very ugly; I have started out with dummy graphics.
Like I said before, no more narrow corridors and grid-based movement. Omega Arena features large, open levels and lots of freedom of movement. The gameplay is, essentially, like Asteroids. You pilot a craft you have to rotate and fly using rocket thrusters. The ship is equipped with two weapons: a grenade launcher and rockets. The rockets are very potent, but you have only a limited supply and are slower than grenades. The grenade launcher has a larger capacity, but has one hell of a recoil.
I have decided to limit the weaponry to these two main weapons, but there will be lots of upgrades you can pick up during the game. This is something I was gonna put in Gridblaster II and I decided to keep it. The same goes for the enemies. The game will have spawners that launch the next enemy when one is destroyed. The enemies in Gridblaster II were the main reason I cancelled it. The collisions between enemies were insanely difficult to handle and kept messing everything up. In this game, they will just bounce off each other and the walls using the built-in physics engine of Torque. Besides the regular enemies, the game will also have static weapons, such as gun and rocket turrets. And lots of booby traps.
You might also wonder where I got the name Omega Arena. The very first game I played when I got a C64 (I was 8 at the time, wich was in 1986) was called Omega Race and followed a similar concept. I had been thinking about a cool name for this project for a while. I had already decided it would have to be something with “arena” in it, so it became Omega Arena.
