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[LiquidAsh]

Shmup Fighter is a fighting game that you design your own shmup-boss-style ships to battle from.  

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Dev Logs:
Week01
Week02
LastWeek

[Inanimate]

Regular shmup, or bullet hell shmup?

[LiquidAsh]

This may depend on the characters and play-style that each players chooses, but I envision it typically getting fairly bullet hellish.

[Melly]

It sounds hectic, and therefore fun.

[iffi]

I've always wanted to see something like this, so I look forward to the result!

[ink.inc]

Have you by any chance checked out cactus' Clean Asia?

It's the best example of a 'boss shmup' I've ever played.

I'd recommend you check it out.

[Will Vale]

It sounds a little like Wartech: Senko no Ronde. That was kind of a fusion of shmup mechanics with beat em up structure. It worked pretty well. Definitely an under explored idea, so I think it's a cool direction to go in.

Will

[LiquidAsh]

Thanks for the great references John and Will.  I know I'd seen/heard of cactus' clean asia but believe I finally just played it for the first time.  I found wartech on youtube late last night.  It's hard to tell what all is going on, but I added it to my goozex queue after watching a few more videos this morning.  Again, thanks!

[Inanimate]

Ohp, I didn't say a lot in my first post. I swore I said more.

This idea is pretty fun sounding, and I agree; this is a definitely under-explored direction of shoot'em ups! I'm already looking forward to seeing this in motion, and watching in horror as I get beat to a pulp.

[LiquidAsh]

Thanks Inanimate (and iffi and Melly).  Things are developing in a positive direction.  So hopefully this project will live up to all of your expectations (and mine).

[LiquidAsh]

I've started taking this game in a build your own boss character direction.  Here are some of the components that I've been playing around with to determine their expressiveness (all in inkscape at this point).  Players will build their ships by lining up a new component's joint (dark circles), and then orienting it as desired.  These joints will also represent a ships vulnerabilities and weapon mount points.

[Sos]

Wow! Will I be able to build like, anything?

[Inanimate]

I see the Enterprise and the Millenium Falcon.

That style actually looks amazing already; if you just made them in solid colors too, it'd be a very toy-like style that would be quite charming!

[LiquidAsh]

@Sos: The player will pay for ship components/upgrades to help keep things balanced.  So you can build anything you want, as long as you have enough in-game money.

@Inanimate: I hadn't considered using this style in-game, but now I will.

Spending all of this time on ship building without any gameplay code feels a bit risky.  That's where my head has been though, so that's what I'm working on.  I'll hopefully have something to share on that front later this weekend. 

[LiquidAsh]

Dev Log Week 01:

Jan 20th:  After tinkering with a lemmings-ish strategy idea for two days, I've decided to ditch it in favor of a more adrenaline-pumping flavor of competition. The new idea involves each player controling a shmup-boss-style charracter.  Each character has a unique array of basic and combo attacks to help deplete their enemy's health.  I feel like the two styles could mash well.  What do you think?

Jan 22nd:  The second iteration of a ship building interface is well underway.  Ship components can be added, positioned, rotated, flipped, ordered, and removed.  There are no longer any joint constraints.  I found some great free aircraft sprites that I've started chopping up, and adding new parts to the builder is drag-and-drop easy.  The next thing to work on will be adding and customizing weapons and vulnerabilites.  I also need to create a system for saving and loading custom ship designs.

Jan 24th: I've chopped up lots of free sprites into components that can be pieced together into a shooter-boss to fight with.  I still need to drop them into the constructor interface but am considering tagging them with some gameplay information first(probably using an xml format?).  I have also made some progress on designing base weapon capabilities and customizations.  Still reconsidering options for ship vulnerabilities, since that has been such a key component to beating so many shooter bosses.

Jan 26th: I haven’t had much time for development over the last few days, but have stolen a few moments to tinker with some gameplay and interface design issues this week.  I’m anxious to release some screens along with a ship creator demo, and will hopefully get to that before this weekend’s global game jam starts up.
Jan 28th:  Global Game Jam’s starting tonight, so this project is going on hold.  I did however, manage to get a ship building demo together just in time.  Aside from balancing, the most major missing piece is the large gun combos.  I plan on randomly generating these, but am waiting to play and determine how difficult and powerful they should be.  Different parts will eventually have different costs, but that’s another issue that will wait until testing.  After GGJ, my next todo is to write the actual battle code.

[Destral]

Posting encouragement. Looks like it'll be really fun! 

[LiquidAsh]

Thanks destral!

Feb 3rd: While loading ships into battle, I learned how slow GameMaker's surface_getpixel function is.  This lead me to ultimately calculate your ships bounding box, center, and surface area (pixel coverage) prior to saving rather than prior to loading.  I've also implemented projectiles that make use of your small gun's attributes: size, rate, spin, and speed.  This will definitely require some tweaking, but that will have to wait until I get the armor/damage code implemented.  Also having second thoughts about the cockpits.  I was originally thinking they would help you control randomly passing sentries, but am wondering whether it would be good to have some way to repair destroyed weapons(?).  We'll see, I really like the idea of aiming for vulnerable/threatening spots, but am not sure how well that will really translate into gameplay when your opponent is trying to counter your efforts.

[LiquidAsh]

Unfortunatly this busy month nearly kept me from having something to submit.  I got a reasonable first pass at the damage system implemented yesterday.  Then tonight, I hacked together some glue to progress between creation menus and a best 2/3 round battle.  I dropped the large guns that use combos/charging due to lack of time, and also ended up leaving out the ship's surface area in damage calculations.  There's a lot of playtest/tweaking to do before worrying about that.  On the positive side, I believe you should be able to add ship component images to the appropriate folder to expand the variety of ship styles that you can create and play with.  Let me know if you enjoy this or have any suggestions (regarding balance in particular). 

I'm really looking forward to playing everyone else's games as soon as I can make some time for it.

[Pencerkoff]

Hello this is Pencerkoff

Starship customization, huh?     

I tried to play this but found that the customization menu didn't seem to work at all.  I can pick up components but can't seem to place them anywhere... am I just doing it wrong?

-PENCERKOFF

[LiquidAsh]

Hey Pencerkoff, thanks for trying.  You need to drop the ship components so they are entirely inside the cyan box in the upper-left corner of the screen.  Let me know whether that helps. 

Also another poorly/un-documented feature: shift-click to select multiple components so you can move them together, and shift while rotating will lock your rotation to the nearest multiple of 15degree angle.  Careful that your components stay inside that rectangle while editing or they will be removed from your ship.