This is a River Raid clone with random maps. I’m planning to put it up in the app stores when I get the chance.
Description
Take to the skies in Air Defenders, a fast-paced arcade shooter where survival depends on skill, precision, and relentless firepower.
Pilot your aircraft through an endless battlefield filled with enemy fighters, dangerous obstacles, and escalating chaos. Dodge incoming enemies, line up your shots, and rack up points as the action intensifies with every passing moment.
The longer you survive, the harder it gets.
Features:
- Tight, responsive controls built for quick reflex gameplay
- Endless, procedurally generated action
- Increasing difficulty that keeps you on edge
- Classic arcade-style scoring system
- Pick-up-and-play design with deep replayability
Test your skills and become the ultimate ace. Dive into Air Defenders and chase your high score now.
Defend the skies.
Nice game, but for me feels like the the firing is a bit delayed and moving left/right increments a bit too much, I just keep running into stuff. Seems like fun though.
3 Likes
Thanks a lot for checking it out and providing feedback! That’s really valuable.
When you say the firing is delayed, do you mean the delay before you can fire a second bullet? I did limit the firing rate because if you could fire continuously, it would trivialize the enemies. You could spray bullets and wreck everything before it even got on the screen. You can fire right away after landing a shot though. The idea is there’s only two bullets on screen at any given time so it makes more sense to line up the shots than hold fire.
With the controls, are you using the keyboard or the gamepad? Also, did you try slowing down at all? You can slow down and make more precise movements if you hold down while you steer. I appreciate your feedback on this because when I first tried it, I thought it was pretty easy to crash myself but now I can speed through everything and get to at least 25k points pretty easily. There is also a shield powerup (green plane) which protects you from enemies and clipping the walls although if you run headlong into a wall, it doesn’t protect you.
Ok, yea, with the bullets I think it’s just the rate of fire, like if I miss and it’s just flying down screen and then I’m approaching a unit there is nothing I can do especially in a tight situation. I guess that’s just game mechanics though.
With the movement, I’m on PC with a keyboard, I tried even holding back to slow it down, but in those narrow corridors I keep running into things on the left/right, like even when I try to lightly tap as much as I can, the movement is in chunks, like maybe 10 to 15 pixels, hard to keep it to a minimum and do just a light tap/shift over.
Seems like a great mobile/tablet game though (if the controls can be worked out).
1 Like
Thanks! Yeah the main controls are actually swipe controls for mobile. That’s how I imagine most people will play it once I launch the apps.
Maybe what I’ll try is options for sensitivity and speed so people can kind of customize the experience.
@gamesanova I updated the game on itch.io to have a difficulty toggle under Options. Let me know if the easy difficulty feels any better. I made the movement slower and the player starts with a shield. There’s also a hard mode where you move super fast that I personally find fun hah.
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Nice. Easy mode definitely feels smoother to me.
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btw, just out of curiosity, did you do that “AIR DEFENDERS” graphic yourself?
If you mean the thumbnail on itch.io, no. That’s AI generated.
yea, the TN, looks really good, what service did you use?
I just used whatever ChatGPT uses. I have a business subscription to it. I generally don’t use AI for graphic design. My wife is a designer, but sometimes I feel like I’m bothering her with my video game side projects hah.