Title: DroneSwarm
Platform: Torque Game Builder on Windows
Team: Mostly me, but with a bit of help for the music and sound effects.
This is my first SHMUP-DEV contest, and actually, my first solo-game. I've worked as an artist on many games before but I've decided to try my hand at programming and thought TGB would be the way to go.
Some concept art:

Here's a video of my progress so far:
http://www.droneswarm.com/files/droneswarm_progress01.wmvThis shows the basics of the gameplay.
You score points by killing enemies, and get a big points bonus for killing an entire wave.
You gain experience for every shot that hits an enemy, but lose experience for shots that miss. When your experience reaches 100%, you level up and get a drone.
There's 3 buttons: Shoot, dispatch drones and freeze drones. Dispatch sends your drones away from your ship, and freeze sticks them in place.
If you hold down dispatch you can detonate 1 drone, and if you hold down freeze you can detonate your entire droneswarm (for massive damage!).
That's basically it so far. Torque rocks. The sounds are from
http://www.soundportfolio.com/[UPDATE July 1st] - Demo available
Download the demo here:
http://droneswarm.com/files/DroneSwarm_Demo.zipControls:
Control pad
Joystick - steer ship
Button 1 - shoot
Button 2 - dispatch drones
Button 3 - freeze drones
Keyboard
Arrows - steer ship
Left CTRL - shoot
Left ALT - dispatch drones
Left Shift - freeze drones
ALT-Enter - fullscreen (not recommended for non-widescreen monitors!)
ALT-F4 - quit
Hold dispatch drones to detonate one drone.
Hold freeze drones to detonate your entire drone swarm.
If you're using an Xbox 360 controller you can also use Right Bumper for dispatch drones, and Left Bumper for freeze drones.
There are probably a TON of bugs, so please post them here if you find any. If you have any problem running the game do let me know.
There's no audio in this version. Sounds are in currently in development by of Alex from SoundPortfolio.com
I should mention that this is not supposed to be balanced gameplay. I'm just throwing everything on screen at once to test all the enemy types I've made so far. The actual game will have carefully timed enemies and paced progression. That said - you should be able to survive this 'demo' if you detonate your drones to take out the stealth bombers early ;-)
[Update July 13th]
A new version of Torque Game Builder (1.5) has just been released and I'm going to try to port DroneSwarm over to the new version. This might take a while so I probably won't have any updates for a few days. In the meantime here's some artwork. These are the ingame sprites at actual size. The stealth fighter isn't in the demo, I'm still working on the code for it.

[Update July 29th]
I've finally started on the background art. Here's some early designs for level 1. The plan is to start high up like this then dive down through the clouds half way through the level and continue lower down. I still have to work out how I'm going to do the clouds.



[Update August 19th]
Not much new stuff to show, I've had the flu and progress has been slow. Might have a new demo out in the next week or so.
Here's the logo for now:

[Update September 10th]
Thanks X-Out for testing the demo.
Click here to download the latest DroneSwarm demo.New screenshots:




Videos:
YouTube Video640x360 WMV video - 20Mb [Update - September 23rd]A preview of the end of level boss for stage 1: