MSOIDS!

By: Brandon McCartin (BMcC)

On: October 4th, 2007

MSOIDS!

Cactus recently released a small game/tech demo on his personal forum called MSOIDS. It’s a mouse & keyboard shooter that’s apparently “inspired by Echoes.” (Which is “a bit like Asteroids,” natch.) But the coolest thing about MSOIDS, and the reason for it being made, is its visual style. It’s all vector art. Vector art with a nice layer of randomization that gives the whole thing this kinda-junky, kinda-funky handmade feel. I can dig it!

Oh, and the music is top notch. Check it out.

UPDATE: Oops, it seems cactus wasn’t ready for a public release when I posted this! But he’s already made an update, cool cat that he is.

Somebody please beat Tim’s highscore:
Direct Download
Highscore Table

Posted in Freeware, Shoot-em-ups, Windows | Tags: cactus

http://www.tscreative.net BMcC

Oops, kinda forgot the point of me posting this. I was _gonna_ use it as an excuse to mention that Cactus is more and more becoming one of my favourite indie developers.

His vast stylistic range and open willingness to try the strange and unpredictable… He embodies so many wonderful things about being indie!

Keep it up, Cactus!
Melly

Cactus makes me think naughty things in bed at night.

I love the name of this. MSOIDS!
cactus

Thanks for the wonderful compliments. I was going to slap on a scoring feature and an online highscore table before I made this completely public, but I guess I better hurry up. I’ll get on it after breakfast :)
cactus

Should be working now:

http://www.willhostforfood.com/users/dorkman/msoids.zip

http://h1.ripway.com/cactussoft/msoids/highscore.php
renkin

Really nice game! The scoring is a bit buggy, though. The in-game score doesn’t reset so when you play consecutive games the it just keeps building. The high score is still correct, though, but it has a one game delay before it updates, it seems. Also, I like the color randomization, but you should probably make sure it picks colors that preserves a pretty high contrast between the “asteroids” and the background. Always pick a dark background and bright objects, or something along those lines.
renkin

Oh, no, checked again and the high score doesn’t work. =)
Petri Purho

I don’t think the highscrore resets at all between games.
raigan

one idea for more well-behaved random colors is to use HSV/HSL color-space instead of RGB, and use saturation and/or luminance to make sure that the foreground/background are distinct. there’s code all over the internet for converting between RGB< ->HSL
raigan

also, it looks great — jon has something similar in ES, a painting/scribble-style renderer.
http://www.cursesfoiled.co.uk BenH

Gamemaker has HSL functions already, so its even easier!
cactus

Whoops. Sorry guys. I think I fixed the scoring bug, and made the windows default mouse cursor dissappear as well. Should also be vista compatible now. Redownload at the same link as before. There’s also a link to the highscore boards in the forum topic.
http://www.tscreative.net BMcC

Haha, sorry cactus! I didn’t mean to put the pressure on you like that. :|

Btw, I took a break last night and just sat mesmerized by this game. Just playing round after round. It was sweet.

(I’ll post an update now.)
raelz

Damn i have to beat Tim ! :P Played 3 times for now, but ill train like 20-30 minutes and then we’ll see :P
raelz

omgz i was so near to tims highscore but the script just overwrites the previous score, so i am back to 400..
cactusrocks

Take that, Tim! :)
Melly

Why can’t I ever access any of the websites related to Cactus? ;-;
http://www.tscreative.net BMcC

Oh snap, you gonna take that, Tim? :D

Raelz and cactusrocks, you are now engaged in mortal highscore combat! Who will emerge the victor?
raelz

Certainly not me. I am just waiting for a human-bot with score 2000 coming to destroy the fun from trying to be at the top place :P
raelz

there we go ;-)
http://www.tscreative.net BMcC

Haha, wow. That’s impressive.
Zmann

Yay, I win.
raelz

Not yet!!!!
But eh, yeh, you do win :P
But when I get some free time (not right now) I will at least try to beat you =)
http://www.tscreative.net BMcC

I wonder if I can even place on this thing…
Rz.

i placed, BMcC, you should be able to.