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[digitalgibs]

I've recently seen some of these games and it got me thinking about their design...  How on earth do they script these games?!?!?  AI? Bullet patterns?  It's insane how many of these Bullet Hell games just throw a crazy number of enemies, but it's always the same; not random.

Any ideas?  I can't imagine that someone sat there and made a giant switch() statement or something.  There must be a more elegant solution... no?

[agj]

Take a look at BulletML, I suppose.

http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cs8k-cyu/bulletml/index_e.html

[Pineapple]

Using a scripting language (Like BulletML), how else?

[Alex May]

I've recently seen some of these games and it got me thinking about their design...  How on earth do they script these games?!?!?  AI? Bullet patterns?  It's insane how many of these Bullet Hell games just throw a crazy number of enemies, but it's always the same; not random.

Any ideas?  I can't imagine that someone sat there and made a giant switch() statement or something.  There must be a more elegant solution... no?

Mathematics lets you describe patterns like these - I'd bet that most bullet patterns are procedural.

[st33d]

I made a scripting language for my bullet hell shooter. It basically detailed one of 360 degrees from a trig look up table and the speed of the bullet, then a pause. That was the turret command. There were also movement commands and a spawn command that generated more monsters as if they were bullets (and I could carry on nesting these monsters forever).