If you haven't heard about it already, VouSei Advent is an original side-scrolling flying shooter. The focus of this game is its deep storyline. It also deviates from the norm in many ways, trying to prove that flying shooters have more creative potential than fully realized.

As for the update, I've fixed the major bug that causes the game to become practically unplayable for LCD screens. Plus, the game can now be played windowed (you were forced to play fullscreen before). It is specifically designed for a fullscreen experience, however.

It has been such a long time since I've last worked on this game (over a year, in fact) that I decided to further enhance the graphics. I added extra effects to 7 of the 16 weapons.

I've also looked into performance and reworked some objects, weapons and test levels (no story missions yet). The game should run much more smoothly on decent computers. Right now, the reccomended specs are 1.5Ghz & 256MB RAM. Any lower and the game will lag.

Design work on the plotline and level plans are moving along pretty fast. Storywriting is one of my strong points, so I have no problems with that. Unfortunately, I'm worried about graphics. I may need some help generating backdrops for certain dialogue scenes (such as the interior of a futuristic lab, a corridor of a futuristic space lab, or a panoramic view of an alien ship graveyard on a strange world). I've done some work on perspective <i>drawing</i>, but perspective <i>illustrating</i> is another thing. I'll try it myself first and see what happens.

The current version of the game is alpha demo v.1.17. I know; seventeen updates before a beta release is pretty outrageous, but VouSei Advent was always second or third priority to my team project (the one that failed). Now that I'm putting most of my efforts on this game now, the beta demo should be done in a couple of months.

Anyway, here are some screenshots of the latest version (click to zoom):

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The alpha demo (released only within my previous team) is presentable. It has tutorials and several test missions, ranging from outrageously easy to unfathomably hard. However, there is no story element added to the game yet. As this game is story-centered, releasing a public demo without introducing the story is pointless, in my opinion. If you are really eager and impatient, you may PM me at GameMakerGames.com forums, where I can PM you back with a download link (it's faster than email, for me). I strongly urge all of you to wait for the beta demo, as it is the story that drives this game.

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Next, I'm planning to do something about the music used in the game. Currently, I'm using MP3 songs (cropped to reduce filesize, of course), which, although amazing, cause nasty pauses to occur periodically. They are so fitting that it is probably better to convert them to .WAV format (instead of using MIDI), but the game filesize will become absolutely nasty. If that is the case, the game will be released in two versions - Lite(MIDI music) & Full(WAV or MP3 music).