Solaroids is a skill-based spectacle of the classics of old with a dash of retro charm and a heaping injection of kick butt adrenaline. Master drift and upgrade your fighter to become the top pilot in the galaxy, or team up with up to three of your comrades and decimate the enemy.
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Fly solo, or with up to three of your friends, against a seemingly insurmountable threat that is after your precious sun. Defend your solar system in a campaign that progresses from tame introductory levels to epic high-octane space battles that will challenge even the most experienced pilots.
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As the campaign progresses and the threat continues to grow, so will the kinds of weapons at your disposal. Perform advanced maneuvers while dodging asteroids, mines, and enemy missiles, as you upgrade the capabilities of your ship and rack up higher and higher scores. Keep your ship and outrider attachments in good repair, or watch your precious power-ups float off into the darkness of space for the taking.
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Another update coming at you in time for the "cold" holidays here in the northern hemisphere. This one is primarily some quality-of-life features.
Not all screens are created equal and so several enhancements were made to improve the experience for those on small, but hi-res screens - for example Steam Link on iPhone/iPad.
It's not automatic, but now you can increase the size of the reticle around your ship up to 200% regular size which can make taking advantage of its capabilities even easier. Whether it's tracking other players whether friend or foe, enemies (red squares), incoming missiles (red triangles), your lost power-ups (rings colored based on the weapon slot), or just that all important landmark the sun (yellow circle), the reticle has you covered. The Reticle Size option is configurable independently for each player.
Another Heads Up Display (HUD) improvement is now many of the text in-game (not menus) can now be adjusted up to 150% of normal size. Technically, you can reduce the size as well for any of you with mammoth monitors that just want the HUD "mostly" out of the way. It will adjust the size of each player HUD, Level Progress Indicator, Tip Text, Threat Lists, and so on. The HUD Size option is located under the Video option menu. Another option that can be useful in a similar situation is to adjust the Zoom Level under the Effects options menu to bring you closer or further to the action, adjust to your taste.
Another small but useful quality of life feature is I've added an Aim Indicator that will project a line out from the front of you ship to assist in ascertaining your heading when everything is flying at you from all directions. By default, it is off, but you can turn it on per player under the Player option menu.
The above screen shot has [b]Reticle Size[b]set to 200%, [b]HUD Size[b]set to 150%, and [b]Aim Indicator[b]set to On. If you need help remembering what things looks like by default... here you go.
Finally, and this is a pretty big move for me. I've created a Localizor project for Solaroids on localizer.com.
Localizor is a platform for helping to bring small developers together with passionate game lovers that are both fluent in other languages (besides my native tongue of English) and wanting to help with the effort to translate, review, or just correct those pesky language barriers. As Solaroids has developed the amount of text in it has ballooned, and it is hard to keep things current, even when I can find translators on my own. If you would be willing to lend a hand, or know someone that would, it is a great way to contribute in addition to helping spread the word about the game. Kudos to the studio that created Localizor, Hovgaard Games (out of Denmark), and for making it available to us micro-indies free of charge.
Solaroids is available in Early Access on Steam, Kartridge, and GameJolt and receives regular updates. Try the demo out today or splurge and get yourself a copy and join the fun!
I hope you've been priming your trigger fingers, as the Nexus Galactic as deployed several important milestone updates to whet your appetite for unmatched...
A bunch of updates to Solaroids, including but not limited to Steam Trading cards, periodic leaderboards, color vector mode, and improvements to the reticle...
Soon you'll be able to re-live that 80s nostalgia but keep the frenetic gameplay that makes Solaroids so much fun! Solaroids is getting a new theme soon...
This fall we were able to showcase Solaroids at a local event. Players battled it out Co-op style, with a bit of competitive death-match style action...
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The engine is actually FNA, at least for the Linux version, not "Custom". I don't know how to fix this in the Profile of the game...
FNA like XNA (used for Windows) is a framework. I’ve built up a whole internal 2D engine I call DFXEngine on top of those that includes rendering, scene, camera, spatial, entity management, audio, steering, collision, input, menus, etc.