Fear the Mantis
Fear the Mantis is a game I created under the supervision of my advisors at Centenary College of Louisiana. It is meant as a test of the movement system I had planned to use in my other project Renaissance.
I had seen games like Geometry Wars and Robotron which used a mechanic that allowed the player to shoot one way and run another. I liked this idea, but I was never very good at concentrating on both shooting and running. I would usually end up paying attention to where I was shooting, and then running into an enemy, or just paying attention to where I was running and then not hitting any enemies. I wanted to create a game in which these two mechanics where united into a single point of focus.
In Fear the Mantis, the player moves the mantis with the w,a,s, and d keys and moves a targeting reticule with the mouse. The movement of the mantis is in relation to the position of the reticule. Pressing w (or forward) moves the mantis towards the reticule. Pressing s (or backwards) moves the mantis away from the reticule. Pressing a (or left) moves the mantis clockwise around the reticule, and pressing d (or right) moves the mantis counter-clockwise around the reticule. The movement and the targeting are united, and so the player only has to focus on one thing, and with practice, this movement system should become easy to handle.
All that being said, there are still many tweaks I'd like to make to this game. I'd like to play with the movement some more, perhaps add more restrictions to attacking. Also, this movement system is designed for one-on-one melee combat, but I might like to see how it would work in a shooting game like Geometry Wars.