In No Time To Explain there was a part where I had to put some writing, so I just filled it with zig-zags and dots that connected to each other, and it looked pretty good. Since then I've used it on a couple other small things and I'm gonna keep usin it.

I had a diagram that showed every character and symbol or name I make up on the spot usually crosses over into 2 or 3 other games without anybody noticing as a way to make it plausible that they all happen in the same world.
but Imageshack low-res'd it over time

UPDATE! I've written down some new enemies and boss stuff in my lil pencil book, but the main thing I'm doing right now is making more art to solidify the world and the game's style.



The actual ART side of this image is kinda crummy, I should've picked one perspective n stuck with it- BUT it was a good excercise in trying out an art sensibility. Someone reminded me that Rtil existed, and I was like OH SHIT, I REMEMBER THAT GUY! And it turns out all he does all day is draw thick-cut chunky-ass females in space shooting pink lasers out o here there n everywhere. So I thought I should pay more attention to that guy.



The gravity on Mars is 38% that of Earth's, which is great news to me cos it FINALLY means I can have a world where little girls climb around and work on heavy machinery.
In this and the last one I evidently can't draw hands, so... try n ignore that... I'm not usually an art person.

Her face was originally this:
until I came up with what, in my mind, is a much funnier character. YES it's cuter if she's a Strawberry Shortcake character, but that's just not me.



Hopefully this is the kind of stuff you'll see in-game. I think this is the Horse-head nebula in the background, which I've already used, but I guess it's just my favourite nebula. Boy, isn't deep space pretty? That's a thing that exists in real life you're lookin at. It's billions of trillions the size of the sun, can you believe that?
Again, I should say, I want most assets in this game to be polygonal- but with the kind of lighting I'm showing here. Everything has a distinct highlight rim to make it pop from the background, and the shadows are COOLER HUEs rather than just being darker. I learnt that from Team Fortress!

Side-note: I hope to have boss fights take place in a letter-box screen, where the letter-boxing is an actual hitbox that you stop up against- but the bosses don't.
Just a funny lil 4th-wall thing that'll hopefully make the boss fights feel bigger and more focused in more ways than one.

Still debating world 3, but its likely to be an ICO inspired roman castle, or a glowing mineral cave.

Maybe it should be a dusty old castle on the outside that gets overgrown with glowicite as you traverse deeper into it.

Yep.
I watch the 4th panel series all the time and those boneheads crack me up. So I said "That's good, I'll use that."

I'm coming up with the 2 scientists who build the robot suit. When they're given the task to create a juggernaut-stopping man-tank, they come up with a quick fix to finish the final 10% that could get them torn asunder if anyone notices they aren't the world-saving geniuses they never asked to be painted as.



Top marks for guessing who they're based on!!!

I'm gonna stretch their faces in all different ways now to prepare for the silly arguments and panic fits they'll get into. I hope I don't stick on this design, cos I don't think it's there yet.

Well the slash attack is basically the most powerful thing you can do, and the point of that enemy (before they mutated guys) was to get people who just swing around slashing everything to come up with a new tactic.
Having them split in half does the same thing as having them be invinvible, except it's much cooler and funnier. I think the idea that you can accidentally help an enemy and make them a complete fucking nuicance is really funny.

And I think them splitting in two is a way better way of communicating "this is a bad strategy" than just having them not take damage.
And it works as a narrative conciet that an alien virus that mutates everything is multiplying itself, and that's bad.
Also it's more of an enemy behavoir or a unique skill, which is what the game's all about.

If I changed it then I'd only be changing it to make things easier on the guy who never tries pressing the other mouse button, and more boring for everyone else.

You can destroy the pink blobs. It's explained in an earlier video, they are their own enemy. If you slash them they split in two, but if you shoot them they die.

I did the craziest thing yesterday: I took an hour aside, got a PAPER NOTEBOOK and just wrote down n doodled ideas WITH A PENCIL. The time just dissapeared, I filled like 10 pages. I don't know when this hardware came out, but I wish someone would've told me sooner. It definately wasn't trending, from what I remember.

Anyway I decided some of this stuff would be a mid-game or late-game reveal, so this video's a spoiler for anyone who's really that interested:


With good sounds n special effects, this is gonna be FFFFFUCKIN SWEET!!!

I've made like 3 scrolling shooters already, and have named about 5 in this thread, so yea I've not never played one before. I'm pulling from the things I don't like- that still means I've had to have played a lot.

And I edited 4 hours ago right after I posted it, you're makin me out to be some kind of post-editing jerk fr no reason here!

OK- yes I am being super harsh on bullet-hells; because I don't want people to think that's what this is and think I'm doing it all wrong or get dissapointed.
Cos if I said "I'm making a scrolling shooter" or "I'm making a shoot-em-up", then people would come in with an expectation. So every time I say what this game is, I have to say "but it's not a bullet hell. I don't like those and I don't wanna make that." Then the expectation is "Oh, good, cos it doesn't look like one."
If I started talking about bullet-hells and which parts I like about em, that would be counter-intuitive to explaining what this game is.

And the second reason is that I jus hate em. Every time I click on a shooter, it's that. It's iike I'm looking for Half-Life, but all anyone wants to make is Quake.
There's decades of R&D in how Modern Warfare's deathmatch works, but I think those're boring aswel. Sorry buddy!
A lot of people say the Dynasty Warriors games are totally nuanced masterpieces, but no amount of Youtube videos is gonna make me have fun playin em.

Also you're over-reacting. Saying "I hate bullet-hell shooters" isn't the same as pissing on my dad, or his friend.

I AM completely ignoring the scoring. Arcades haven't been a thing for like 20 years, and the only games I've ever even noticed high-scores in were XBLA games. I don't wanna make a game about scores.

CATCHING MISSILES isn't what you do in Bangai-O at all. I'm talkin about straight-up fuckin grabbing rockets out of the air:


In Bangai-O you hold down the fire button, and then fire a hundred rockets in a circle, and they hit the enemy shots.
I can't find any good videos of the game that aren't crazy Youtube speedruns, but it's a hundred dots and lines and numbers onscreen like I'm avoiding.

Radiant Silvergun's a shooter with one special move where you fill up a bar, and he sweeps a sword around in a giant circle and kills everything. That's just as nuts as the first thing to say that's anything like this.
And Darius lets you capture enemies? Come on, I'm talking about Kirby-ass Megaman style take the shield guy's shield. Or eat the fire guy to breathe fire. I made a game a while ago where you

. That's the kind of thing I'm talking about.

You're calling out games that have one weapon each that're KIND OF... BARELY like the goofy examples I made up. This is stupid. If you like bullet hells and know how all the ones I'm dismissing are totally different and unique, then say that. Don't make out as if I'm making some boring generic clone thing for some reason.
And none of the enemies I've shown even fire bullets, and there is no score system.

If you like that I'm using pink and cyan rectangles for lasers instead of 10 layers of gradients... good! Cos I like that aswel.

I officially announced this dev blog, cos people are enjoying this early concept stuff so... why not, right? Scary 

I agree that being tied to the mouse makes it feel like a Flash 5 game from ten years ago. Or like a custom cursor or something. It's a shame that mouse controls have that automatic stigma, but it's THE fastest and most accurate way to move around.
I hate the keyboard more than I hate the mouse though, the idea of gliding around in straight lines with arrow keys and pressing A & S to attack (or J & K) I think would feel like EVEN MORE of a web game, to me. That'd feel way more artificial than clicking on guys to bash them.
Hopefully, in my mind, people will spaz around with the mouse and zig-zag up n down for the first 10 minutes- and then just forget about it and play the game. Then say "Oh, I get why this uses the mouse now, because the freedom of moving at whatever speed you want is fun". HOPEFULLY.
I do recognize that that's a thing people feel weird about though.
And you can get hit, and have to be careful about where you run, and all the regular stuff games like this have anyway, so don't worry about that.

And I'm having controller input aswel, in the final game. Cos people always ask fr that.
Also you're right! I should tie weapons to the numpad. I don't play PC games, so I would'nt have noticed that. The Mass Effect weapon wheel is fun to me, but yep, there should be a keyboard button for that aswel.

I really like the camera shake, but I'm starting to notice that it kind-of shakes YOU around, and kind-of makes your weapons really inaccurate... so I should alter that.

I'd post a playable update, but I dunno, the game's just a blank room with a couple enemies in it right now. It's not a level.

Current enemy-type count: TEN!

That's enough, right? No, I know it isn't. I'm gonna need SO MANY tricks in this game to flesh it out enough for people to put money down.

I went back to an old challenge I always go back to, and that's the Devil May Cry 4 Blood Palace and OH MY GOD!! I totally remembered why those are my fuckin favourite games ever. So many cool small ideas about how to do charge weapons, why grabs are fun, snapping guys in half, kicking the hot galactic christ out of everyone.

So, I'm gonna admit, this enemy is basically an enemy from that
But hey this is a shooter, so it's different. And you can freeze this guy with an ice weapon to stop him. Someone commented on the video though, maybe this'll be too hard for people who aren't playing the same way I am? I've bin using a tablet pen as a mouse for ages...

It feels like I'm spamming, sorry.
I'm gonna keep doin it til someone writes a bigger post than me, just a heads up. Or until someone notices I should've put this in Devlogs.

OH-- AND JUST TO REMIND EVERYONE: This is programmer art. This isn't how I actually draw games.

I WISH I had more time to work on this, but I had to catch up on work in the week, and sadly I had to hang out with real friends on the weekend.
So WITH THE UTMOST OF SHAME I'm updating with one new enemy type:


(one of these animations pauses as a glitch, so fuckin gimme a break)

This enemy holds a shield. It makes them very durable and they take a lot of damage. They stand infront of smaller enemies deliberately to protect them when they aren't focusing on you. That was a pretty hard thing to code- and hopefully this'll pop up out of Flash eventually, so someone else is gonna have to figure it out later.

You can brute-force through their shield, or you can do the smart thing and attack when they lower the shield.

Or you can do the REALLY smart thing and grab the shield out of their hand to protect yourself.
And then throw it back at them.

That's kind of over-powered, but it's also a really cool thing to accidentally figure out, so I'm keeping it in. It wasn't accidentally coded in, obviously, that was a deliberate idea.
Hopefully at this point you're all getting why I hate bullet-hells and why I'm making this.

If you've got any good ideas, as always, throw em at me.

Why's that?

I'm still figuring things out, but I've bin guessing so far that the earth forces are blue/green, the mars forces are red/orange and the aliens are pink/purple.
But that's just off the top of my head.

I've not started it yet, this is still the Flash prototype I guess.

I've still not told my producer anything about this game, cos then we'll launch into solid production-time. Once we do that then I'll HAVE to finish it, as my job. So I'm still too scared to do that lol.

That's why updates are so slow.

yaaaaaaayyyy somebody cares

Coming up with a solid game world and style was definately something I wrote down before I started. Most games are just made up as I'm going, and No Time To Explain was especially a god-damn mess in that regard.
This is why I'm doing a tonne of concept stuff now, to make sure I've got a CONCRETE idea of what I'm doing before I dive in. I wrote down a plan of what happens in Act 1, Act 2 and Act 3, and I'm splitting those into what happens on individual levels now.
It's still a goofy cartoon, but now all the characters and enemies are part of a really neat little story with a beginning, middle and end.
I'd write what it's all about, but then this post would look like a wall of text and nobody'd read it.

I drew this to help communicate what I'm aiming for:

I think I'll draw more scenes like that soon.

Anyway while I was outlining what happens on all these levels I realised I need way more enemy types. So I got more ambitious with what I was doing:


These guys are regular shoot dudes, EXCEPT they have 2 interesting states:
If you grab one, you'll hold him facing the opposite way. So you can use him as a weapon.
If there's a storm ball onscreen, they'll all gravitate towards it. This means you can't get close to them without being electrocuted, and also it makes their fire more concentrated and dangerous.
Enemies that have relationships with other enemies is FUCKING COOL!! I can't wait to have robots who combine like a megazord, or enemies who infect each other or whatever. Fastball special.
Here's something I did with that concept:



These guys are 30 little bots who will seek eachother out and bite onto eachother's tails to form one long snake. They're invincible when connected, but otherwise have pretty low health. Also they're more dangerous when connected cos they take up more of the screen.

Now I just need to keep my head on straight and decide when something's genuinely cool, and when it's just programmer-cool.

I want this other character to be a famous #1 space pilot, who becomes very jealous as you become the new hot topic and he devolves into an angry whimpy baby.



I definately want him in a skinny white jumpsuit, but I'm still lost on what I want him to look like. I started leaning into a tall blocky Woody from Toy Story, then I spun into a stubby spikey angry Vegeta, then I watched some cartoons and completely fell on my ass. So I guess I'll come back to it later.

I think I want him to have a pointy chin, and I think I want him to have a long nose.
Not touched the gameplay for a while. Weird, right?

We straight-up put our game on the pirate bay when that came out. It was already happening on other, smaller sites even while the game was still in testing, so we decided that if it's gonna happen, we should at least be the ones steering the ship.

To leverage gain from what we were doing, I made a twisted mod version of the game where all the characters wore pirate hats and eye-patches, a lot of props were replaced with rum and gold pieces, some people had hooks for hands and so on. The idea was to give people something to laugh at, or tweet about, or post on reddit and forums about- and just give everyone a secret joke to be in on.

It worked! Everyone talked about it, everyone laughed, some people debated piracy (not my intention but alright), and we got a tonne of coverage n made some sales. PirateBay even deleted any other upload of our game as a sign of good faith, so the only version up there is my pirate version. Even our Season 2 expansion isn't up there.

So the lesson learned is that you should just accept that people will pirate your game- BUT you can do more than just sulking about it.