By Alec Meer on January 15th, 2009 at 5:47 pm.
Your cost-free indie curio of the day is a bravura work-in-progress from Alex Austin, the other half of the Gish team. Unlike the surreal ‘toonery of his and Edmumd McMillen’s joint projects, A New Zero is very much straight down the line. A simulation, almost. Austin cites the likes of TIE Fighter and Mechwarrior as inspirations, and they’re certainly there in the combat mechanics. As for the game as a whole, it’s got a definite scent of Battlefield and a dash of Battlezone to it. While there’s bot play in there if you’re scared of strangers, really it’s a team-based multiplayer game: two squads of planes, boats and bigger boats trying to wipe out each other and each other’s base.
Impressively, it’s all the work of Mister Austin on his lonesome. Doubly impressively, it’s only 432k big. Just one 10,000th the size of Left 4 Dead, as Austin points out – hell, it’s less than a 30th of a Peggle.
You’ll have spotted from the shot above that there’s not a lot of textures going on, and that’s because everything in the game is procedurally generated when it loads. The result is an oddly evocative brown and orange Tron-like landscape, but one containing some pretty sharp vehicle control modelling. Which is my way of saying “I’m rubbish at the planes.”
A New Zero’s merry blend of demanding precision and gigglesome screw-ups strikes me as the kind of thing a bunch of folk in our Steam group should hop onto to give it a thorough try out. Have community, will leverage…
Here’s a trailer, in case your mousing hand just fell off, leaving you physically incapable of clicking through to the game’s site. Again – 432k. Crivens.
15/01/2009 at 17:55 jsutcliffe says:
kkrieger had textures, and was under 100k! Shenanegans!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger
10/10/2012 at 10:05 frightlever says:
(Yeah I know, but you know how I got here)
Krieger spent several minutes generating fractal based textures, it didn’t come packed with any.
15/01/2009 at 18:01 Srejv says:
It’s always interesting to see what people can cram into small executables.
15/01/2009 at 18:07 Srejv says:
jsutcliffe: isn’t .kkrieger 64k? but it’s not multiplayer. :(
15/01/2009 at 18:16 Pags says:
Sweet! That’s all I have to say for now, I must rouse a rabble of merry men to play it with before I pass complete judgement. But mostly: sweet!
15/01/2009 at 18:40 Down Rodeo says:
Interesting. It runs very badly on my laptop but from what I can tell this is good stuff.
15/01/2009 at 18:48 Pags says:
Might sound like a stupid question but: how does I drop bombs?
In the fighter I mean. I arm myself at the base and everything but yeah… I don’t understand why left-clicking shoots on the boats but doesn’t shoot in the fighters.
15/01/2009 at 19:08 Benjamin Finkel says:
I’m like a drunken sailor in this. Why is the y-axis so unintuitive? Why can’t I flip it?
Ben
15/01/2009 at 19:23 Heliocentricity says:
THE BOMBERS RULE. you have you press the appropiate number to load on the carrier, space to drop. You get 1 shot.
missile boats can blow throgh the walls, the fighters when carrying missiles can be quite good boathunters. But the only purpose of that is to drive through a water offensive because bombers can kinda win the game if unharrased, thus the gunboat becomes useful.
15/01/2009 at 19:38 Gunrun247 says:
If only there was some sort of instructions available to you, by pressing F1 or similar.
15/01/2009 at 19:38 Pags says:
Okay just used F1 to look at the in-game help and OH MY GOODNESS BOMBERS RULE. Seriously, the satisfaction you get from timing your drop perfectly is awesome; especially when a building is down to it’s green centre and you time the bomb just right so it lands right in the middle of the green cube.
Also, pitch black night times! So good!
15/01/2009 at 19:42 apa says:
carrier command!
15/01/2009 at 19:49 jonfitt says:
I am so there this evening. Cyrenic are you reading this?
15/01/2009 at 19:53 Sajmn says:
Yea, the darkness makes for some fun moments when you’re flying a bomber and can use the bomb-vision kinda like NV. Or when you make a landing by coordinationg only by the spawner lights and end the landing in a powerslide.
For bombing I prefer to fly as high as possible (abit over 300) while flying toward the enemy, and then just as I’m over the enemy base I charge down from the heights dropping a bomb down into a factory throught the roof and turbo back off to my base while dodging flak from behind…
Yea it’s fun ^^
15/01/2009 at 20:02 Pags says:
The afterburners definitely come in useful after a bombing run; still haven’t got my landing technique down pat yet though. In many cases I end up a few feet short of the landing pad in the water. At night, I tend to just give up completely and nosedive into turret fire after I’ve dropped my load.
Fun times!
15/01/2009 at 20:06 Magic says:
The night always kills me… I think I landed once on the carrier but the game decided i crashed so maybe I never managed to land at nigth ^^
Also when its all dark the explosions are about 10 times more spectacular, therfore the game is about 10 times more cool…
15/01/2009 at 20:17 subedii says:
The graphics remind me of the 3D visuals in the early Battle Isle games. Except with physics. Groovy.
15/01/2009 at 20:38 Rich_P says:
That was really fun.
Imagine how cool it would be if they took this concept to the extreme: huge battles with 50+ players, a dozen vehicle types, persistent front lines. Get the graphics out of the way and focus on the gameplay. Basically PlanetSide without the system requirements and shiny textures.
15/01/2009 at 20:58 Plopsworth says:
I take it everyone noticed the Battersea Power Stations, as featured prominently on Pink Floyd’s Animals and the Children of Men film?
15/01/2009 at 21:07 Radiant says:
I can’t shoot anything in a bomber…
Do you have to arc it in?
Or is it fired like a missile?
I’m a BEAST in a gunboat though albeit only vs other boats :) I can’t shoot down the planes with my guns at all.
15/01/2009 at 21:08 Radiant says:
oh yeah I’m the guy with the pakistani flag.
15/01/2009 at 21:13 ...hmm... says:
played a little, seemed nice.. but.. no invert for the plane!! omgwtf!!!!!111 /RAGEQUIT
15/01/2009 at 21:26 Bob Arctor says:
Very nice but runs like turd!
It really shouldn’t!
15/01/2009 at 21:34 dozer1986 says:
Yes, Battersea Power Station! I used to live a couple of miles from it. This is the first time I’ve seen the world’s largest brick-built structure in a game which didn’t have the words ‘Microsoft Flight Simulator’ somewhere in the title…
15/01/2009 at 21:43 Rich_P says:
Aren’t the advanced power plants from C&C Red Alert inspired by the Battersea Station?
15/01/2009 at 21:54 Schmung says:
The lack of invert in planes is making this nigh unplayable for me. I can’t find anything anything in the config file either :/
15/01/2009 at 21:54 Doc MacRae says:
I can’t figure out what the missile boats do, but the bombing is honestly the best.
15/01/2009 at 22:05 Radiant says:
missile boats are like the bombers but with an extra cannon ability.
If you hold the right mouse button you can aim where the missile lands [its really slow and very hard to notice] they’re proper dangerous.
15/01/2009 at 22:13 Hypocee says:
There are various keyboard/control emulators which render all control mappings customisable. One such is JoyToKey. http://www.oneswitch.org.uk/2/I/JoyToKey/JoyToKey.htm
15/01/2009 at 22:23 Tei says:
the master server seems down just now :(
15/01/2009 at 23:05 Leelad says:
Nicely done, how many -peggles would that be?
15/01/2009 at 23:28 Wedge says:
I only had enough money for a plane once and I crashed it before getting in the air.
The Gunboat was awesome though, I love how the cannons blow pieces out of the level all Worms like.
16/01/2009 at 00:09 jonfitt says:
Wait, the demo shows up as 938kB for me. Is it a new version (0.71)? I hope there’s a lot more content, in this economy we can’t just go throwing around 500kB extra you know.
16/01/2009 at 00:57 Ginger Yellow says:
“Just one 10,000th the size of Left 4 Dead, as Austin points out – hell, it’s less than a 30th of a Peggle.”
I prefer “3 centi-Peggles”, myself.
16/01/2009 at 01:32 wat says:
Why does this run so horribly for me? Its going like 1 frame every 2 seconds. Putting the resolution down to 640×480 at low detail almost makes this playable. I’m on a C2D E8400 @3.8Ghz Win7 build 7000 x64 4gb ram.
16/01/2009 at 02:30 TWOD says:
You can make the mouse inverted by going into the config.txt file and setting keypitchup=273 keypitchdown=274
16/01/2009 at 02:58 Doc MacRae says:
^_^
Bunch of RPSers on now.
/I’m “stripey”
16/01/2009 at 02:59 LukeE says:
…or 30 millipeggles.
16/01/2009 at 03:04 Dorian Cornelius Jasper says:
Gunboats are surprisingly handy. I’ve taken out many a factory with just them alone. Then again, I’m terrible at the Fighter.
16/01/2009 at 03:46 Plopsworth says:
More games should have boolean operation cleaving damage modelling. The explosions, (especially when striking the critical green blocks at dusk) are indeed very nice, bested only by Far Cry 2 and GTAIV in my subjective opinion.
16/01/2009 at 04:42 Rich_P says:
Been playing this on-and-off all day. Chatting with the RPS folks is almost as fun as the game itself :D
Seriously, this is the most fun I’ve had in a vehicle-based online FPS since the glory days of Battlefield ’42/Desert Combat. There’s so much potential there.
And dear lord are the destructible buildings fun. My strategy is to blow open the sea wall on one of the flanks and sneak over to the factory.
16/01/2009 at 05:34 Aftershock says:
Best. Explosion. Ever.
16/01/2009 at 05:36 Aftershock says:
Also, THE DOWNLOAD WAS NEARLY 1MB!!!
16/01/2009 at 05:51 Jon says:
I wish there was some feedback like, ‘reduced factory by 9 percent’ or ‘took out a turret’.
16/01/2009 at 06:50 Scandalon says:
Interesting…a bit tough to control/get used to, but fun. It also downloaded a lot faster than that bloated install of Gravity Bone. :)
16/01/2009 at 06:51 Scandalon says:
Also, connecting/spawning for the very first time playing at night, and seeing just a few random lights, along with a message saying “Choose a vehicle” with no other menu was frustrating. I almost gave up and quit then and there.
16/01/2009 at 07:34 Tei says:
It feels somewhat like Airquake. So this needs a copter and a hovercraft, and a anti-air vehicle
16/01/2009 at 07:38 malkav11 says:
When you have no art assets and 100% of the graphics are generated on your machine in real time, you can do a lot in very little file size. Program code is, after all, pretty much just text.
16/01/2009 at 07:54 Radiant says:
Radiant’s Gunboat Tips!
1) Lead your shots
2) Get BEHIND the flight path of planes.
3) Attack a turrent whilst it is firing at your bombers.
4) When you run out of guns wait for boats to go through the tunnel and pummel the tunnel walls with your cannon.
5) When the boat’s cockpit goes ‘pop’ stop.
16/01/2009 at 07:55 Radiant says:
Now someone teach me how to fly a bomber!
16/01/2009 at 08:26 A New Hero says:
You had me at “Mechwarrior”.
Frustratingly, I’ve just started work (no rules specifically stopping me from visiting RPS…yet!) and now have to wait until I get home tonight to give this a goaaaarrrghh! I can only tell myself that the game looks pretty but will play like an absolute pig, otherwise I’m in for a very special kind of torture. :(
16/01/2009 at 08:55 Dorian Cornelius Jasper says:
@Radiant:
Jasper’s Bomber Guide!
Well, first you’ve gotta load a weapon. Preferably before takeoff. Then flounder around a bit with F1 Help-tips up for a half hour until you figure out how to fly.
Also, while money is the big balancer between large and small teams, it’s really easy to exploit the server to get around the money limitations that having multiple teammates and no factories will impose on you. This’ll probably be fixed later, though.
Doc MacRae here’s “Stripey,” whose coat of arms is presumably a red stripe on white with little hearts on the upper left and lower right corners. I’m “Quilty,” whose flag is basically a red-and-white quilt. I’ve not yet seen other RPSers confirm their identities.
I could make a few wild guesses as to who “Penisman,” “Marathon,” and “Angry Legoman” are. But trying to divulge the identity of “Generic White Cross Flag Guy” is nigh impossible.
EDIT: Apparently the Edit function has returned! Let us celebrate by Editing the crap out of everything we post.
16/01/2009 at 09:02 pepper says:
This game is a lot of fun, i wish more games had this kind of ‘simple’ gameplay! Although it doesnt run too good on my laptop or desktop, i think it is because everything is proceduraly generated.
Yeah the battersea powerstation in Red Alert and i believe seeing it too in a Path Beyond.
16/01/2009 at 09:19 Tei says:
My stripe is a black flag with a red slash plus two cross on sw/ne. Somewhat like Telejano.
I can make a better coat of arms, as this character set is somewhat like the one from a C64, and I have lots of books full of C64 ascii-art (read: I am too lazy to make a better one, but I suppose I can, has I have created tons of draws with this very character set)
16/01/2009 at 09:30 Schmung says:
Cheers TWOD.
I shall try and play with fellow RPS’ers tonight. Surprisingly, the game runs ok on my weakling PC. Sweet.
16/01/2009 at 11:20 nabeel says:
As a fighter, I don’t know what the bloody hell I’m doing.
16/01/2009 at 11:36 Tei says:
@nabeel: load a bomb first (key 1, on the runway as you start with the fighter) move to a enemy building and press space to drop the bomb. Right-button is freelook, may help you se if the bomb hit something. shift is turbo, to get away from the turrets shots. You may also kamikaze, and drop the bomb a second before the collision, but this game have a fun phisic engine and I suggest you not to, or fun things may happend.
The icons floating over the enemy base are the players. “b” is for bots, everything else are newbies.. people with a customized icon are players with more time invested on the game :-)
16/01/2009 at 12:09 nabeel says:
I … can’t stay in the air long enough to do anything -_-
Missile Boats, on the other hand, ftw.
16/01/2009 at 12:20 Tei says:
@nabeel: pick a server with good ping ( <250ms) or practice hosting a game.
If is dark, just wait, you are likely to be eatean by a grue^H^H crash into the factory :-)
16/01/2009 at 13:18 dracko says:
God, this thing is a gorgeous experience.
If we’re talking procedurally generated content, RPS should give Derek Yu’s Spelunky a go.
16/01/2009 at 13:50 Jubaal says:
Gave it a quick go and looks fun. However I could not find any option to invert the mouse. Unfortunatley I cannot play any FPS games without inverting the mouse so I’ll have to wait and see if they add that in.
16/01/2009 at 14:05 pepper says:
I just launched a missle from a fighter just after takeoff on a 45 degree angle, it hit a enemy fighter dead on whom was flying, epic!
16/01/2009 at 14:10 Pod says:
Just played this with the office at lunch time. Much fun. Cant’wait for it to get better (and the planes to have guns and be easier to fly ;))
16/01/2009 at 14:13 Pod says:
ALSO: FUN THING HAPPENED!
I did a fly by on a boat and knocked the little guy out of it, bounced of the water (pure luck) and managed to afterburner my way back into flight.
Woo
16/01/2009 at 14:18 pepper says:
Pod, try doing that by a plane when your not carrying any ordenace, fun fun fun! Also, try shooting a missle at the start of the day so you can hit em when there still in a group!
16/01/2009 at 15:11 braveotaku says:
Wee that was fun. I was playing as “mdot” a blue m and dot on a white background.
16/01/2009 at 15:24 thefanciestofpants says:
Excuse me? It has dashes of Mechwarrior, Tie fighter, Battlefield and battlezone in it?!
Since when are people making games directly for me? Freakin. Awesome.
Oh and bring back the Peggle unit of measurement permanently!
P.S. Mexico is NOT in Australia, unfortunately. The mexican food here is disgraceful, and I weep for it.
16/01/2009 at 18:59 Ziv says:
some of the best explosions I’ve ever seen, and like someone here said only bested by FC2 and GTA IV (which my computer slows down when showing) and the explosions in the scene w/ tons of tanks in crysis.
also, we need servers on computers that can hold them, right now there are two and they are both very laggy.
16/01/2009 at 19:12 pepper says:
Indeed Ziv, the explosions are great, its fun when a missle strikes a group of boats when flying over them, and then feeling the shockwave. I think they should give this guy a development team and a studio and see what he could pull off given enough time and resources.
17/01/2009 at 03:39 Scundoo says:
Bloody Freaking Awesome!!
They do have to optimize the engine though. It lags like hell, and its not the connection’s fault.
17/01/2009 at 04:39 Tricky says:
I think there’s some terrible netcode in here. The framerate drops as latency increases. That is a Very Bad Thing.
This is in a super beta, though. Hopefully it’ll improve.
17/01/2009 at 22:36 Terr says:
I’m enjoying this, but the performance is lacking. Even at 800×600 I’m having a very low frame rate.
(in case the developers read this: GeForce 260 with the 180.60 drivers)
18/01/2009 at 07:07 Haml3t says:
I am really angry that a free game one 10,000th its size is preventing me from playing L4D. Very, very angry, especially when I get a wing shot off my plane and have to constantly correct for that on my way back to base. I have a red background with an X across it, and in the middle two aces. That description’s not too good but it’s the best I can do. Can someone explain plane-launched missiles for me in greater detail? I’m only using bombs because I’m not too sure how missiles work.
20/01/2009 at 00:50 SirBolimia says:
Planes are quite tricky, you haev to get used to them.
The first time I got my hands on one I flew into the water in a matter of seconds.
Now I am able to peform succesfull bombing runs at night.
First get a fighter,
Then press and hold 1 or 2, 1 will arm your fighter with a bomb and 2 will arm it with a missile.
If you want to fire press space.
Bombs fall and are very usefull aganst buildings.
Missiles are good for taking out turrets and missile boats.
Gunboat is extremly usefull for clearing out missile boats.
Missile boats own buildings and turrets.
05/02/2009 at 16:53 CopperD says:
is a fan site Ive started for people that play the game
02/05/2009 at 11:16 ur mum says:
there is a help button with all the intructions on t just press f1 then all your problems will be solved