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[Paint by Numbers]

Recently I decided that I wanted to make a an actual shoot-em-up, complete with levels, enemy patterns, and elaborate bosses. One problem: I haven't coded a single thing in something like a year. So I decided that before I tried to pull off a proper game, I would make a much smaller and more manageable one to "warm up", such as it is.

This is that game.

Psychespace is a very simple arena shooter with an arcade style. You are a spaceship shooting down procedurally generated ship after procedurally generated ship. I am designing it to have a lot of bullets and enemies, but I've played it too long to tell whether it's too hard or too easy.

Bere is the current beta, at roughly 1.7-8MB.

Still to add:
-a ton of stuff...
-better/more ships and behavior
-powerups and health increase
-better background
-adjust difficulty, make more difficult/less difficult
-more effects and polish
-fix any scaling errors
-shots conforming to weapon placement
-pausing
-more sprites so you can tell the player from the enemies when the game's not moving
-sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll

Please feel free to post scores here!

[Paint by Numbers]

Updated with a build that keeps track of highscore and has a bit of other polish.

[Alec S.]

This is looking pretty cool so far.  I like the visual style and the enemy designs.

A few issues and things to consider:
 - I think the enemies shouldn't fire their attack as soon as they appear on the screen.  Give the player a second or two to register that there's another enemy before it attacks.
 - I noticed one enemy ended up with a laser at the same speed as it's movement, meaning it kept pace with it's own laser.


Also, and this is just a thought, it might be nice to, rather than constantly throwing a bunch of new enemies at the player, have the system stick with a few of it's procedurally generated enemies, and slowly add new ones to the mix.  That way, the player can devise strategies for individual enemy types, but they still need to come up with new strategies each time they play the game, since there will be different enemy types showing up.

[tesselode]

First of all, you might want to look at the mouse controls in the menu. The position of the mouse needed to highlight an option quickly gets misaligned with the actual options.

At first, I kind of liked how chaotic the game was, but it quickly got tiring. You should definitely follow Alec's suggestion to make the game more predictable.

Also, you might want to reconsider your choice of music. And take out the FPS counter on the gameplay screen.

[Nuprahtor]

Cool game, I got 1530 scores:)
There were moments in game, when I cannot avoid the bullets, really "bullet hell", I think you must make levels with increasing difficulty and cooldown between this levels for rest

[Paint by Numbers]

Thanks for the feedback! I've been meaning to add changes in which enemies are attacking you, just haven't got around to it yet...

And take out the FPS counter on the gameplay screen.

The FPS counter is there because it's a beta and I want to have the FPS on hand when debugging it. I have no intention of leaving it in the normal game.