Unity

Pawarumi is a verizontal shmup, inspired by the likes of Ikaruga and Radiant Silvergun but with its own original mechanics, set in an universe based on south american folklore and 90s pop culture reference.

It’s currently on Steam Greenlight, so vote for it to see more high-quality shmups on Steam.

The game is being made in Unity by some experienced developers who have previously worked on titles such as Assassin’s Creed, Ruse and The Crew. Take a look at the forum post to see some development screenshots from the Unity editor.

View post on imgur.com

Drifting Lands is a new shmup in development by Alkemi, a French development studio.

You can download an early preview of the game at the website here.

The game looks beautiful and plays very well already.  It features a customizable weapon system and the plan is to expand the game with a large inventory and skill set so that it becomes a hybrid of shmup and hack&slash style gameplay.

The game is made with the Unity3D engine and features some beautiful explosions and background art. It’s great to see high-quality games developed with Unity as this is a very popular game engine for shmup developers.

You can also follow Alkemi games on Facebook if you want to keep up with development of the game.

I recently gave a lecture on shmup development with Unity as part of a course at RMIT University.

You can download the lecture slides and example project.

Lecture slides [PDF]
Unity shmup template [ZIP – Unity 3.5.3 project]

The example project is a template for Unity shmup development – it contains just a player, an enemy and a scrolling background, however it implements many of the optimizations needed to get a shmup to run properly, such as:

  • Bullet pooling
  • Collision optimization
  • Precise controls
  • Transform caching

It’s written in Javascript, and is thoroughly documented with inline comments. The code is intended to be understandable to novice programmers.

Forum discussion here.

If you’re interested in developing a shmup but don’t know where to start then this should help you. Here are 3 threads in the forum providing shmup-templates, which are frameworks with the basic controls and systems in place to quickly create a shmup.

Torque 2D shmup framework.

Unity 3D shmup framework.

Game Maker Open-Source Shmup Engine. And Warbird – a barebones game developed with this engine.

Simply choose the engine you want to work with, download the template and start making your shmup! Please post any questions in the forum. The Unity 3D framework is currently in-design and feedback is requested.