#uridium

So I spent this morning deconstructing the ship animation from Andrew Braybrook’s seminal C64 space shooter, Uridium. There’s something so elegant about the way the player’s craft flips over and then rights itself to change direction. All of this happens effortlessly over a 50Hz scrolling background.

Below is the looped animation. The position of the cast shadow is used to indicate height above the surface (it is not uniform through the anim cycle - there is added elevation during the flip before the ship goes back to hugging the surface at full speed). 

And below is the ship animation from the Amiga follow up, Uridium 2:

[this post is an edited version of an earlier post on Uridium]

Gallup all formats chart, Your Computer Volume 6 No. 5, May 1986

Uridium is by the quite prolific Andrew Braybrook, creator of other games including Paradroid. Given that his twitter handle is @UridiumAuthor it’s clear it has a special place in his career. As with the music charts you can see a pattern where #1s are not the product of a release being exceptionally successful -- many big sellers never make it -- but of momentum built that means something new getting immediate attention. For games this usually applies to games within a series, and means we’ll be seeing a lot of sequels. It’s not as easy for a game developer as for a singer or band to get the same following, since they’re not emphasised in the same way, but sometimes it works, as we have seen with Ultimate.

In Andrew Braybrook’s case it’s also interesting because Uridium is not an obvious game to see at the top. It’s a space shoot-em-up, which is a genre that kind of goes right back to Space Invaders, in this case turned on its side and scrolling, but we don’t see a whole lot of those at the top in the mid-80s. In the context of Paradroid, a which uses a shoot-em-up as a base for a complex game about taking over droids and exploring, Uridium is back-to-basics. It seems that he’d earned players’ trust that this was an exciting prospect.

Your more simple task involves taking on enemy defence drones and doughnut-shaped fighters above the backdrop of the enemy’s larger transporters. Without reading up I wouldn’t have known that the parallax scrolling -- the transporter moving on screen, the stars staying in place behind it -- was considered a major technical triumph, but partly that’s because Uridium looks and plays smoothly enough not to seem like a tech demo. Its limited colour palette with occasional details brightly picked out works very nicely, including the way it changes up each level.

Relatively simple as its gameplay is, Uridium is not quite a typical shoot-em-up, and my learned response that I should get from the left to the right of the level as quick as possible and prioritise avoiding enemy ships let in short order to repeated failure. Compared to other games I was familiar with, the enemies are really underpowered. You can even fly through them, or rather over them -- 3D space! However, I initially kept getting wiped out by the more impenetrable defence that is walls, or getting to the end of the transporter and having to turn around.

The twist comes from the fact that the goal of each level isn’t just to get through and survive, shooting as needed, but to destroy docked and defenceless enemy spaceships on the transporter on your way. Do enough of that and you can come in to land and do whatever mysterious action it is that leads to the whole lot disintegrating as you sweep away. That means the better strategy is a lot of slowing down, which the game lets you do to the point of turning around and heading back where you’ve just come from. There’s still enough danger to keep that from getting dull, though. The other effect of the set-up is to place you more clearly in the role of an aggressor than these things usually get, which is an odd feeling when any explanation for the need for such pre-emptive strikes takes place off-screen. Careful, methodical death and destruction, with a high score table to track it.

WIP : Level 4 / Current Development State Hello all! 

I thought it was time for a status quo, therefore I did a rough recording of the current development state again. Instead of creating new assets, I spent some time with coding (GML) in the recent weeks. That’s the reason why you haven’t seen any new artwork recently. 

Since we want to add a shop system later, I started to prepare the first essential things for it – e.g. loot/money drops. In the current version of level 4, for most destructible objects, there is a 50/50 loot chance integrated. This value will change later. In the final version, the player is able to purchase a "force luck" upgrade, which will raise the chance to get more loot.

By the way I did again a tiny HUD revision: the current cash (KB) is now shown next to the score (SC) with subtle effects whilst the displayed numbers are changing. Additionally, you can watch the “Destruction Status” (WRECK %) of the level in the center of the HUD. The player gets a bonus when 100% is reached. The HUD needs still a lot of improvement, but that's something for later – at the moment the HUD serves its purpose.

Also newly added is an “Enemy Detector”. The detector detects all flying enemies nearby, shows their y position and approximate distance (size of warning sign will increase, the closer the enemy comes). The colour turns into flashing red if the enemy attacks to the direction of the player. If the enemy moves away from the player, it turns into a neutral colour. A very useful addition – otherwise the game play might become pretty unfair in some situations. 

Andrew is working on an advanced shadow routine for multiple parallax layers. That means: the farther away the layer, the smaller the shadow. This will surely add a great feeling of visual depth to our game. I’ll probably do some art again in the upcoming days. As soon as there is something to show, I’ll post it here.

Uridium sees the return of Andrew Braybrook, who we saw previously as the creator of Paradroid. One giveaway is that Uridium has the exact same orange explosion animation, which is fair enough when working at the speed of more than one game a year. Last time I talked about the different levels Paradroid operated at, appearing to be the game he could make with gestures towards the one he wanted to make. Uridium, in contrast, is exactly and completely itself.

To achieve that, its scope is rather smaller, consisting of a side-scrolling shoot-em-up in space with the only intermissions being a simple slot machine-like mini-game for accumulating extra points between levels. This time rather than controlling stand-in burger logos, we have a pretty convincing spaceship in our control, taking on enemy defence drones and doughnut-shaped fighters above the backdrop of the enemy’s larger transporters. Without reading up I wouldn’t have known that the parallax scrolling -- the transporter moving on screen, the stars staying in place behind it -- was considered a major technical triumph, but partly that’s because Uridium looks and plays smoothly enough not to seem like a tech demo. Its limited colour palette with occasional details brightly picked out works very nicely, including the way it changes up each level.

Uridium is still not quite a typical shoot-em-up, and my learned response that I should get from the left to the right of the level as quick as possible and prioritise avoiding enemy ships let in short order to repeated failure. Compared to other games I was familiar with, the enemies are really underpowered. You can even fly through them, or rather over them -- 3D space! However, I initially kept getting wiped out by the more impenetrable defence that is walls, or getting to the end of the transporter and having to turn around.

The twist comes from the fact that the goal of each level isn’t just to get through and survive, shooting as needed, but to destroy enough docked and harmless enemy spaceships on the transporter your way before coming in to land and doing whatever mysterious action it is that leads to the whole lot disintegrating as you sweep away. That means the better strategy is a lot of slowing down, which the game lets you do to the point of turning around and heading back where you’ve just come from. There’s still enough danger to keep that from getting dull, though. 

The other effect of the set-up is to place you more clearly in the role of an aggressor than these things usually get, which is an odd feeling when any explanation for the need for such pre-emptive strikes takes place off-screen. Careful, methodical death and destruction, with a high score table to track it.