Astrokill

[Pinback]

Looks to be a single player space shooter with both 3rd and first views, set for Steam's early access on April fools day http://store.steampowered.com/app/376880/[/url] Has a main site for the game http://astrokill.com/[/url] where some more details can be found (posted below) and some annoying gifs can be found, they could do with doing an FAQ on both the Steam page and their site. GameplayPilot spacecraft ranging from small, nimble fighters to heavily armed gunships. In ASTROKILL, you will engage in combat against enemy fighters, capital ships, turrets, and even space mines. To succeed in this unforgiving zero-G battlefield, you must master your ship and its weapons. You will blow away spaceships with machine guns, flak cannons, and homing missiles. Your Gravity Shield will protect you from enemy fire and even turn their weapons against them.Campaign and Survival modePick a faction and enter the fray in either a story-driven Campaign mode or an arcade-style Survival mode. In Campaign mode, you will fly missions within the context of a faction-specific storyline. With each passing mission, you will discover new enivornments, characters, ships, and challenges that test your skills as a fighter pilot. If stories aren't your thing and you just want an endless blood bath, then there is Survival mode. Like an old-school arcade game, you must fight and survive wave after wave of progressively more difficult enemies. Fight to beat your own top score or attempt to dethrone the number one player on the Steam leaderboards.WeaponsIn ASTROKILL, battles are fought with conventional weapons, like belt-driven machine guns, proximity-based flak cannons, and Javelin-style guided missiles. When it comes to inflicting damage downrange, nothing is quite as effective as high-velocity metal slugs. The kinetic energy behind a 30mm bullet travelling at 600m/s is tremendous (about 68,000 Joules). If that's not enough, flak cannons fire explosive projectiles that detonate near enemy fighters, doing area damage. Homing missiles track fighters and attempt to intercept them and detonate within their kill radius. If a missile misses its intended target, it will reassess the battlefield and track a new target. MechanicsThe gameplay mechanics in ASTROKILL are similar to old-school space shooters, such as X-Wing and Freespace, where the focus is on combat. In ASTROKILL, dogfights are frequent and challenging. Players must master their flight controls and weapon usage to be successful. The weapon systems are all projectile-based, so players must lead their shots to hit moving targets. If an enemy ship is selected, a leading crosshair will assist in aiming. Limited ammo means players must strategize their weapon operation. Lulls in combat provide opportunities to rearm in hangar bays. The spacecraft controls are thruster-based and can be operated in either manual or automatic modes. In manual mode, players have full and direct control over each thruster. In automatic mode, thrusters will fire at the right time and intensity to keep the spacecraft heading in the direction it's facing. This unique and realistic flight control system is the basis for all spacecraft movement throughout the game. Rocket physicsIn ASTROKILL, the propulsion system is based on Newtonian physics. When fired, each thruster applies a realistically simulated force on the ship. This has numerous implications on gameplay. For example, to travel a constant speed, a pilot simply accelerates to that velocity and then stops accelerating. The speed will be maintained due to the lack of friction in space. In terms of braking, it would be very difficult for a player to fire each thruster in such a way that his or her spacecraft comes to a complete stop (with respect to a frame of reference). This is why each spacecraft comes with a flight control system that intelligently fires each thruster at just the right time and intensity to bring the ship to a stop. So, when you see the exhaust flare from a thruster, it's not just a visual effect. That thruster is applying directional acceleration to the ship proportional to its intensity.The Gravity ShieldOne of the unique features in ASTROKILL is the Gravity Shield. As its name implies, this device creates a negative gravitational field around the spacecraft. This negative field affects objects with low mass, like projectiles. Bullets, flak shells, and missiles will arc away from the field as the GShield "pushes" on the projectile. The strength of the shield diminishes quickly due to its high power consumption. And, a spacecraft cannot fire its own weapons while the shield is up. When the GShield is used properly, it will drastically reduce damage, increase the chances of winning a dogfight, and allow a single fighter to survive an encounter with a superior opponent, like a warship.

[icsDrafe]

Looks nice, worth a try for me. As I see from other videos there is a velocity limit at 200m/s that saves the day for the zero-G arcade fun. In the game Starshatter they implemented a soft vlimit type, where the thrust to that direction starts to drop exponencially after passing the vlimit regard to the frame of reference. It's better in a way that you don't have to listen the vlimit sound like in this game. Unfortunatly there is no superb solution, if you can pick up few km/s with your kamikaze fighter only the death star like stations might have some chance for survival, and the ww2 arcade fun is gone as well. Looks like no shield against that kinetic sword without moving from the sci to the fi.

[sscadmin]

8GB of Memory as a minimum requirement... little steep probably for some people out there, especially since the graphic card requirements are not too high on minimum spec. A plus is that there is a campaign/story mod in the game and surprisingly the game looks decent for something still in early access and having not heard of Astrokill until reading this post.

[sscadmin]

Just saw that you can pick this game up cheap in this indie bundle: https://groupees.com/millerontheroof[/url]

[Pinback]

Seen the key mentioned in the steam forums and their guess is, it an Alpha key?. Also apparently they had the memory requirement set at 16 GB until some one said it ran fine on 8GB so it could be lower.

[Pinback]

Looks like the games release has been put back till the end of May now.

[Pinback]

According to the Steam forums it going to be released this Friday the 27 with a price tag of $10 although both may change, guess we will find out on Friday.

[Pinback]

It did finally come out yesterday just under the 1 GB about 850 meg, just had a quick mess around with so nothing to report apart from it's working.

[Pinback]

Astrokill has been getting some attention lately. http://steamcommunity.com/games/376880/announcements/detail/590359138919829664[/url] - All projectiles have a longer effective range- Projectile damage is now calculated off relative velocity at moment of impact- Changed capital ship behavior in Deliverance level to allow more breathing room between frigates- GShield now affects a smaller area with more aggressive anti-gravity- Balanced hp for DOM and OBA turrets- Added helpful radio-dialog to levels Boreas Recon and Dante Guerrillas- Changed radio-dialog in most levels to help players with mission-objectives Audio- Added recorded vocals for almost all radio-dialogPerformance- Optimized proximity-spheres to reduce number of overlap-eventsVisuals- Added secondary explosions to all fighter-explosions- Added light-beacons to all frigates (flashing anti-collision lights)- Projectiles are now visible from any distance- Adjusted lighting on all particle-effectsHUD- Primary and secondary ammo is now displayed numerically for targeted opponents- Numerous cockpit-elements now flash when they need attention- Cockpit-hints are no longer displayed for new players (tutorial recommended)- Compass movement smoothed outUI- Practice button renamed to Tutorials- Tutorial descriptions updatedBugs- Fixed issue with GShield letting projectiles through occasionally- Fixed issue with Start Campaign button not showing for new players- Fixed array-index-out-of-bounds issues with squad-members and muzzle-locations

[Pinback]

New trailer for AstroKill.

[sscadmin]

Game definitely has some promise, they had this in a bundle that I forgot too purchase a while back Maybe I will see it in another one soon.

[sscadmin]

Latest gameplay trailer for Astrokill, still in early access but they are approaching the v1.0 release soon.... Maybe this year I hope

[Pinback]

Big surprise here, a new update after about a year since the last one. [url]https://steamcommunity.com/games/376880/announcements/detail/3477246104745423405[/url]

Just over 300 meg so it seems a substantial one.

[sscadmin]

That is a big update with a lot of change and improvements. I have been holding off on getting this one because I wanted to see if it was going to be officially released or not. With it being a v0.9.7 its getting close to a v1.0 release I hope.

[Pinback]

I thought the game was dead and abandoned, nice to see it come back, just hope they start making some regular updates.

[sscadmin]

Currently on sale on Steam for $5 until 3/27, I might pick this up if I remember too.... so many games so little time.

[Pulstar85]

Too bad the dev ceased working on this game just like many other early access demos out there. Steam just isn't a good platform to risk buying unfinished games on.

[sscadmin]

Posted by: @pulstar85
Too bad the dev ceased working on this game just like many other early access demos out there. Steam just isn't a good platform to risk buying unfinished games on.

The dev doesn't seem to update often that is true, he went almost a whole year between updates from 2018 to 2019, but when he did release a update it was a huge one. I usually don't personally buy a game until it has been released or I have a very high confidence it will be completed. It has been roughly a year since the last Astrokill update so I would expect a update sometime soon. But if we don't get one in 2020 then yeah it would be a dead game in my opinion. It looks highly playable in the state that it is in from the videos I have watched.

[Pinback]

Who would have guess it, but it's another update to the game. ASTROKILL - Steam News Hub (steampowered.com)

This update marks a fundamental shift in how the game works under the hood. There are a slew of improvements that increase performance, improve joystick & controller support, optimize HUD space, and future-proof the game. Besides a beefed up architecture, the HUD has been redesigned to improve the 3rd person experience and minimize on-screen clutter. I did a visual polish on all the environments to depict a harsher, brighter atmosphere. A new fixed turret-system is now present in several missions. I'm very happy with the visual style of this new asset and want it to carry over into a new, playable faction.


HUD

Thinned out many reticles and gauges to reduce visual clutter & obstructions
Rearranged gauges so that no gauge is obscured in 3rd person
Implemented an animated leading crosshair to emphasize the location to aim at
Added a flashing dot that is placed on the origin of the selected target
Fixed the orientation of holograms displayed for the selected target
Fixed an issue with target-reticles becoming gimbal-locked




Graphics

Increased the brightness of star-light in all levels to better match a real space-environment
Added a post-processing effect to over-expose highlights
Optimized how skyboxes are drawn
Fixed an issue with tracers being far too oversized at long distances
Modeled and textured the new Phalanx turret-system
Overhauled the "3D asset studio" accessible from the Graphics menu (assets are now only loaded one at a time and camera-controls are more intuitive)





Gameplay

Replaced many static turrets with a new "Phalanx" turret that is mounted on a floating platform (older turrets were mounted on broken debris)
Moved the 3rd person camera back significantly on all fighters to reduce the screen space taken by the player's ship
Reduced the difficulty of some particularly hard levels
Overhauled the objective-system to make level-scripting much more streamlined





Joysticks

Overhauled the entire system that feeds joystick-input to the player's ship
Mapping-presets are now read-only, while the "custom" mapping is always writable
Replaced the "bypass" option with a "none" option in the mapping-dropdown
Added a mapping for the Thrustermaster Airbus Sidestick
Fixed an issue with some fields not being writable
Offsets are now zero in most cases and multipliers are usually 1 or -1 (inverted)




IO

Added a mouse-sensitivity slider to control the speed of the menu-cursor without affecting gameplay
Wrote a new axis-input system to manage simultaneous input from multiple controllers (may have PTSD from this one)
Eliminated a slight lag from all controllers (keyboard, mice, joysticks, gamepads)
Rewrote/simplified internal timers responsible for mouse-movement and processing input in general (game should "feel" the same even at 500 fps!)
Tested VR with the Oculus Rift S (rather glorious)
Tested the Logitech F310 gamepad and the Thrustmaster Hotas X joystick
Core

Upgraded to UE4.22 (still behind, but I can get it caught up to 4.27 quickly)
Replaced many, many Blueprints with C++
Faster overall load-times (both running the game and opening levels)
Internal objects are now initialized in the correct order and destroyed when no longer needed
Level-bounds can now be defined as any combination of spheres, boxes, and cylinders
Added support for altering level-bounds as gameplay-conditions change
Added support for prohibited zones within valid level-bounds (a restricted area)




UI

Menus are now placed in front of the camera in a much more reliable & accurate way
Improved accuracy of cursor-alignment with buttons & dropdowns

[sscadmin]

I dropped this from my wishlist back in 2020 because of lack of updates, maybe I will re-add the game for next steam sale.... I think the dev would make more money if they did regular updates or at the least finished their initial vision for the game so it can leave early access.