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[nihilocrat]

I made a game for the Experimental Gameplay Project this month. The theme was "Night and Day".

Play it here!

It's a shmup where you fly along a gigantic cylinder (“the Axle of Heaven”) and fight enemies on the “dark” side while collecting ammo and powerups on the obstacle-filled “light” side. Compatible with Xbox 360 controllers (A to fire, X for special) or really any joystick.

There are a few bugs... occasionally enemies will spawn on top of each other and “push” the other one out into space, pretty amusing. Also, it’s very very rare but occasionally the light side will generate a wall of four obstacles which is impossible to dodge if you are in the center of the light side.

Undocumented control: press up to boost your speed... usually this isn’t a good idea though.

I'm interested in ways that the game could be improved. If I had more time I would have made music, improved the enemy/obstacle placement algorithms, and made it so bullets could curve over axis, and have bullets that curve over the cylinder to allow for non-vertical shots.

[flavio]

Congratulations, the game is fun! Imho, it's too difficult, you'd better make a less steep difficult curve.

[nihilocrat]

Glad to hear you think it's too hard!

I will try to make the various concepts of the game more obvious, it seems to be a significant obstacle for playtesters. I'll probably add some kind of skippable tutorial, attract mode, or demo of some kind.

[iffi]

I really like the concept!
I found the "light" side where you collect ammo, however, to be very easy compared to the "dark" side with the enemies. Unless you intended it to be that way, it could use a little balancing.
Also, the enemies that don't shoot bullets do really brutal damage - almost all my deaths were from those.

[RandyO]

so I really like this idea and execution except for one thing: the speed I rotate around the cylinder.  if my L/R movement was twice as fast (faster at all) I would feel like I had a chance, but as it is, I can't react at all, I can't even dodge between all those blocks on the light side. 

it took me 4-5 seconds to rotate all the way round the cylinder, which means each plane of play (8 of them), takes at least a half second to cross.  that feels far too long to me.

I didn't really get to any of the other bugs just cause I couldn't survive long enough.  anyway, that one change would probably make me way more into it, cause overall it's really cool and interesting.

[MindEraser]

Yes, for the apparent rate at which the ship appears to accelerate (and there doesn't seem to be an possible deceleration), the horizontal movement is to slow. Scale horizontal and vertical speed together.

I did have quite a bit of fun playing this though, good job! It is kind of difficult, but I sort of expected that.

[D-TurboKiller]

Have to agree with most of what's been said so far.

The ship turns a bit too slow right now, it should be increased a bit. Also the rammers(non-shooters) are a bit overkill, it's like I'm facing moving light blocks in greater numbers, I think it'd be better to just lose a bit of health instead. The light side is a bit too easy in my opinion, even with the slow turning it's not hard to predict when to turn, so perhaps having a chance for dark side enemies to invade the light side?

Nevertheless, this is a fun little game, it just needs some tweaking 

[Helmeted]

This pretty neat!

Since I've never been a score-focused player, my suggestion would be to give a more urgent reason to be shooting enemies on the dark side. Maybe the ones that get by you could come back at you from behind in the great shmup tradition, and even come at you on the light side. Oh. Then you could try to lure them in to obstacles, like a Millenium Falcon chase scene, since you can't shoot backwards.

[PompiPompi]

It's really fun! Just flying around feels immersive.
I have to agree, that there isn't that much point killing the enemies, most of the time you can just avoid them.
Overall good job, you can make it even better!