I’ve got another small update to incorporate a few new noteworthy features that I wanted to get wrapped up before the Portland Retro Gaming Expo (PRGE)[www.retrogamingexpo.com]. Yes, that’s right… Solaroids will be showcased at PRGE this year thanks to the Portland Indie Game Squad[pigsquad.com]. This is the first event for Solaroids outside of my local community, and I’m excited to show it to the retro gaming lovers at PRGE.

Well enough with the ancillary commentary, let’s get on to the update.

First, I’m happy to present a new “shared” screen Local Multiplayer option. In this mode, rather than split the screen into up to 4 smaller screens, you can play with or against friends in a single screen. The camera will pan and zoom to keep all active players visible. Dueling has never been better.

The down side is things can get on the small side if players a long way from each other. Use the reticle to keep your direction straight – it always stays the same size and now displays the primary ship color. I’m still working out how to make power-ups readily identifiable when zoomed out for easier identification. You can find this new option under Gameplay in the option menu.

Second, I’m starting to map out additional stages and levels, and I just couldn’t wait to share some new background elements with you. For now, I’ve added an option under Gameplay Called Stage to select the background elements to use. Ultimately this will be incorporated into the campaign along with additional enemies and other hazards, but for now it just adds an alternate view. Please let me know what you think and if it’s the right direction.

Finally, a message is now displayed to compliment the final level wave warning sound. Players have all too often wondered what the warning sound means the first time they play. In addition, in Free Play mode this message is accompanied by a list of the end-of-wave baddies your about to face. You’ll have to let me know if you find it useful to be able to anticipate the onslaught your about to face and possibly be defeated by, or just find it useless noise.

New Features

• Shared-Screen Mode – Play on a single screen instead of splitting the screen.
• Stage Select – Pick Stage 1 or Stage 2 (only affects background graphics)
• Indicate the end of the level with a message in addition to the alarm sound.
• List end of level threats in Free Play mode.
• Adjust end of level waves.
• Adjust Free Play mode difficulty. It gets a lot harder after a few cycles than it used to which was already pretty hard.

Issues Addressed

• Fixed a bug related to positional audio and seamless wrapping.
• Fixed a bug related to particle effects (explosions) and seamless wrapping.

Known issues

• Borderless window option is only implemented for Windows right now.
• Disconnecting an external audio device being used by the game will cause a crash/freeze on Linux/OSX.
• Some options and more recent prompts are English only or machine translated right now. If machine translated, they are indicated with an asterisk (*).

I hope you enjoy the new features, and once again, happy blasting!!

Solaroids is available on Steam Early Access and is still being actively developed by Chad Yates as part-time Indie game developer. Come try out the free Demo, join the Community HUB on steam, or join the ranks of brave fighter pilots defending the solar system and competing for high scores and prestige!

This release is dedicated to YouTube player/reviewer Big Joe Bear who was kind enough to both make me aware of a key issue now fixed in this release, and to also make a stellar video tour de force of Solaroids. Note to self, cause internet outages around the world to entice more players to play!! If you can, give his channel a look and support him if it interests you:

Hello Everyone! Things have been quiet on the Solaroids update front lately. Work hasn’t stopped, but I’ve had to focus on some other aspects related to the game that are outside of the game itself. Stay tuned.

Some things I’m working on, but aren’t ready yet, are additional leaderboards. I’m considering weekly and monthly boards, as well as per control type boards. I will probably be adding daily leaderboards once I have the planned Daily Challenge game mode implemented.

New Features/Tweaks

• Reset parallax in multiplayer when doing a cut transition.
• Don’t show initial tips (in a ring around the sun) in free play mode.
• Tuning of score multipliers:
  • Modern Control Style gets a 1x base multiplier now instead of 0.5x, with increased adder and increased decay factors.
  • Classic and Hybrid control styles stay mostly the same but get an adder boost.
• Turn agility power-ups now increase (a little bit) the maneuverability of the ship in Modern (dual-stick) control style.
• Fade in/out of per player stats / leaderboard displays.
• Update framework libraries for Linux and OSX versions. These are big changes, especially with respect to audio, so please report any issues.
• A bunch of internal changes to prepare for new features.

Issues Addressed

• When playing with keyboard or mouse+keyboard, the mouse cursor is now locked to the game window during gameplay so you don’t accidentally move it outside the window in the thick of combat. This is also in effect when borderless mode is active. So, for those of you that play borderless full-screen on a multi-monitor setup, you’ll no longer accidentally scroll to the other screen and click on some other window with catastrophic results. Note that the mouse won’t be locked to the window when pausing or from the main or exit menus. Thank you Big Joe Bear for communicating this issue to me.
• Fix an occasional 1-frame visual glitch when detaching outriders and exploding complex enemies.

Happy blasting!!

Solaroids is available on Steam Early Access and is still being actively developed by Chad Yates as part-time Indie game developer. Come try out the free Demo, join the Community HUB on steam, or join the ranks of brave fighter pilots defending the solar system and competing for high scores and prestige!

Solaroids has a brand spanking new trailer! A lot has changed while in Steam Early Access over the last year, and it was high time to do a bit of a refresh.

The old trailer was created when I released a early build as the last Xbox Live Indie Game (XBLIG), a whole story of its own. It was definitely getting a bit dated and long-in-the-tooth. It also took too long to get to the action that was a staple of the genre, not to mention the totally crappy local multiplayer footage I created late at night by myself, trying to pilot multiple ships (sigh). For the nostalgic, here’s a link to Trailer 1 – RIP.

Often people wonder why the name Solaroids, and also can’t help to include tongue-in-cheek phrases that relate to biological issues I’d care not to discuss with you all. This trailer hints towards the overarching story to the game still in the planning stages, and hence the mix of Solar with Asteroids for familiarity and homage to its roots.

I’m still learning a ton about both Indie game development and marketing, and this new trailer original started out with different pacing. Some kind folks that hang out on the game development discords gave me some constructive critique. This resulted in me trimming the front to show gameplay quicker and trimming the quotes towards the end – which probably were excessive. Personally, I still like the old one in some ways, so if you’re a trailer connoisseur, I’d love to hear your critique about both versions.

Here’s the original version of Trailer 2, which I’ve dubbed the “extended cut”:

If you haven’t played Solaroids before, or you haven’t played it for some time, I hope you you’ll give it a try (free demo here), or brush of the dust and give it some play-time with the new features. Either way, please share some feedback in the Steam Community or in the new Solaroids Discord server. Also, if you like it or know someone that might, please help spread the word by sharing in your circles on Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, or your other favorite social platforms/forums. It’s hard to get noticed among so many games.

Solaroids is available on Steam Early Access and is still being actively developed by Chad Yates as part-time Indie game developer.  Come try out the free Demo, join the Community HUB on steam, or join the ranks of brave fighter pilots defending the solar system and competing for high scores and prestige!

Hello Everyone! Just a small update to release a few new features, and round up a few bugs — some of which were released as hot-fixes several weeks ago.

As players rack up more and more impressive scores, I thought it would be cool for you to be able to compare the control style you typically use with those of the other players. Classic and Hybrid (single-stick) control styles are the purest and most challenging modes, and as discussed in a previous update, come with some scoring advantages. Now you’ll be able to see what control style a given score was achieved with. Next to scores in the global leaderboards you’ll see a symbol denoting which control style was used: (C)lassic, (H)ybrid, and (M)odern. Note that this is only computed for new scores going forward, so any current scores are classified as Unknown and won’t show a symbol until you beat your previous bests.

New Features

• The Control Style used to achieve a score is now recorded and displayed next to the high score. (C)lassic, (H)ybrid, (M)odern. You have to have played in a particular style most of the time for it to count.
• German translation updates.
• Cleans up old log files when debug logging is disabled.

Issues Addressed

• Ensure friend leaderboards immediately update in-game.
• Adjust thruster sounds for Modern (dual-stick) control style.
• Tune bullet sound effects.
• Fix issue where the top-X scores were shown instead of an empty list when you don’t have any friends that play Solaroids (what a shame).

Previously Released Patches

• Fix issue with Control Style text in HUDs overlapping when multiple players are choosing their control style at the same time.
• Fix crash on some machines/locales when player stat displays are generated.

I hope you enjoy the new refinements and features.

Once again… Happy blasting!!

Solaroids is available on Steam Early Access and is still being actively developed by Chad Yates as part-time Indie game developer. Come try out the free Demo, join the Community HUB on steam, or join the ranks of brave fighter pilots defending the solar system and competing for high scores and prestige!

Hello everyone! This is just a small update to release a few features that I didn’t want to wait for a bigger update.

First, watching players at a local gaming event, and on YouTube, I fast tracked an idea I had for helping to identify power-ups that can be used. Now if a power-up can’t be collected, or wouldn’t be useful to collect, they will be drawn ghosted as an indicator. Cases where power-ups can’t be collected are when you’re maxed out on a capability such as bullet rate/velocity/strength, or for repair power-ups, when your already fully repaired. In the later case, previously it would collect it anyway, but I felt that was misleading since other power-ups would just fail to collect. I hope now it will be more clear when to chase after the buggers!

I also improved the ability to swap outriders for fresh ones. If you have a bunch of outriders and one of them is more damaged than the one your about to pick up, they will be exchanged. Previously it wouldn’t always swap them out.

Oh and one more. After watching Space Game Junkie do infinity circles around two of the early bosses trying to get their own missiles to hit each other, I just had to enable it. So now after a short delay, enemy missiles can actually hit enemies if your adept with the piloting skills!

I hope you enjoy the mini-update and have a great weekend!!

New Features

• Drifting power-ups are now transparent “ghosted” if you will not be able to pick them up — for example if you have already maxed out the capability. This includes repair power-ups, so no longer will you feel like you have to chase something down to only find out that it wasn’t useful at that moment.
• Adjusted floating power-up effects to make the central icon graphics more visible.
• Enemy missiles can now be used against them. After a delay, their missiles can hit enemy ships including the source of the missile.

Issues Addressed

• Swapping outriders for outriders of better health wasn’t working as intended. You should now be able to swap a damaged outrider for one in better condition.

Solaroids is available on Steam Early Access and is still being actively developed by Chad Yates as part-time Indie game developer.  Come try out the free Demo, join the Community HUB on steam, or join the ranks of brave fighter pilots defending the solar system and competing for high scores and prestige!

One of the greatest things as an Indie game developer is too be able to watch people play your creation first hand. I’ve been fortunate to be able to participate in several Vandal Overnight Games events here at the local University. The University of Idaho sponsors both Fall and a Spring semester event each year, and it is always loads of fun for everyone. I usually spend most of my time hanging out with players in the Solaroids area, but there is a lot going on all over related to gaming of all kinds. From board games, physical games, card games, VR, classics, tournaments, etc. there is something for every game lover. My Solaroids T-Shirt wearing kids have a great time too, whether they are playing Solaroids or board games in the nearby rooms.

This spring (April 7th) I saw both folks from previous events as well as some new faces. From early afternoon till close to midnight there was an almost constant stream of players coming, playing for a while, leaving, and then coming back, sometimes multiple times. I don’t know how many player hours were clocked that afternoon evening, but there almost wasn’t a time where the controllers didn’t have players both young and old at the helm.

One thing I learned this time is to not take your stuff for granted! I thought I had everything together and pretty much ready to grab and go from the last Solaroids event in December (a gaming themed Holiday party for work), but I spent way to long tracking down a “lost” Display Port to HDMI adapter that ended up getting misplaced in the rush. In addition, while setting up I discovered that my old XBox 360 wireless controller adapter was not going to power-up no matter how many times I unplugged and plugged it in, switched USB ports, or rebooted! Luckily home wasn’t far away with both a spare and XBox ONE variants, and my lovely assistant still at home was ready to save my bacon!

New Promotional Materials

This spring I decided to amp it up a bit and so spent the weekend before, and a few evenings, re-creating my box art in a a brighter and higher resolution format so I could produce a banner graphic and token cards.

The banner graphic turned out pretty good despite my nervousness of never having made one before myself. At 36×92 inches and exported at 300dpi it was a massive 10,800x 27,600 pixels. My original box art I created in the GIMP long ago but was never designed for print.  I went back to my source material and re-composed the original box art in Inkscape, my vector illustration program of choice, and then added a few of the more recent visuals and descriptive text. I even modified a game mode I have that just draws the background elements to only draw the stars so I could take advantage of my in game compositing to make a new star backdrop.  If you look really close you’ll see where I mirrored it to fill the bottom of the banner!! Well I’m pretty happy with it and it looked great at the event. Even the folks at the local FedEx printers payed me compliments, and I was able to give a token card to one of them that was really interested that it ran on Linux.

Speaking of which, the token cards turned out really well as well, and I was able to hand out a bunch throughout the event. In addition to the rest of the game, I wrote the Soundtrack myself over the course of development, so I decided it would be cool to include a “Free with Purchase” Steam Key for the Soundtrack as a Downloadable Content (DLC) that they could use or pass along.  Time will tell whether these get activated, but I thought it would be a good thank-you-for-playing freebie.

Solaroids is available on Steam Early Access and is still being actively developed by Chad Yates as part-time Indie game developer.  Come try out the free Demo, join the Community HUB on steam, or join the ranks of brave fighter pilots defending the solar system and competing for high scores and prestige!

The next big thing I’m working on (and getting close to completion), are alternatives to the classic “tank” controls. Soon you’ll be able to use the mouse to orient the ship when playing with keyboard controls, and use the thumb sticks to orient the ship when using controllers with analog capabilities. I’m also planning some limited twin-stick style controls.

This update adds a few small features and tweaks that I hope you’ll enjoy till then. There’s a new power-up, along with some balancing/bug fixes, but probably the most exciting is that some of the Terminator style bosses can now be destroyed before finishing off all their peripheral parts. Alas, normal energy-based guns can’t do this, but missiles can, and so can your ship. So… as at least one person requested, and others have eluded to, the ability to kamikaze is born! It’s quite satisfying to see the remaining pieces of the boss drift off as space debris.

New Features

• Added a Primary Weapon Recharge power-up which allows more standard/outrider bullets to be fired at once (normally limited to 4). This also increases the auto-fire rate.
• Bonus ships are less likely to be found and can only be collected up to level 10.
• Add kamikaze dynamic. Ramming asteroids and enemies at high speed result in detonation of your ships core.
• Enemy cores can now be destroyed using missiles (or player ships) before all peripheral parts have been destroyed. Normally they are invulnerable until they are the last remaining piece.
• Free Play mode has now been locked until level 10 has been beaten.

Issues Addressed

• Main cannon bullets were not being limited to 4 as they were supposed to.
• Terminator MKII bosses were not firing strafe bullets as they were supposed to.
• Fixed issue that caused activation of “trial mode”.

Solaroids is available on Steam Early Access and is still being actively developed by Chad Yates as part-time Indie game developer.  Come try out the free Demo, join the Community HUB on steam, or join the ranks of brave fighter pilots defending the solar system and competing for high scores and prestige!