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[th15]

Download Here: http://www.wyrdysm.com/games/CarpeUniversumv008.zip
Game Website: http://www.wyrdysm.com/carpegame.php

Description
Carpe Universum is an intense Shoot 'em Up (SHMUP) game that features a music driven spawning system.

Also, you will be able to roll to dodge bullets. This means that you will never be hemmed in by bullets, if you die, you'll only ever have yourself to blame.

My objective with this game is to build a very intense shooter by encouraging aggressive play through the way the gun works and with the shield charge. The gun only fires if there's less than a certain number of shots already in existence, so if you approach really close to a target it fires a whole lot faster. The shield charge destroys bullets and enemies in your way but retreating from that position is much slower.

However, you can roll to the left and right at any time and you are completely invulnerable while rolling. This allows you to stay mobile.

The aim of all this is to encourage very dynamic play where the player roams around the entire play field rather than just sticking to the bottom of the screen all the time.

Screenshots

[shinygerbil]

That vid looks awesome. 

Downloading now!

[carbon]

I'm not really a fan of these kinds of game (because I have bad spatial awareness and I don't realize that I'm running through bullets sometimes!) but I gave your game a try and it was fun. Even though I couldn't get a good score after multiple tries, the concept of special moves in this kind of game is new to me and it was great.

I hope this game is finished!

[Akhel]

I love this! The style is awesome, the pacing is good and the combo system is a very neat idea. I'm not sure about having infinite lives, though - you may want to reward the player not only with points, but also with new stages etc.

Looking forward to seeing more of it.

[th15]

Glad you guys liked it

My point of view about death in this game is that it tends to detract from the immersion. It's a momentary lapse, but for those two seconds that you respawn you are pretty much being yanked straight out of the game. I wanted the action to be continuous and without respite, even when you're hit.

I may implement some kind of score requirement to advance to the next stage (failure means replaying the level) but it's kinda up in the air. I might just let you play through it regardless so that it come across like a medley of songs (the enemy spawns are tuned to more or less be in sync with the music too). I don't really believe in disallowing the player from advancing in the game if he fails, there's just no point in doing that outside of an arcade environment.

[serprex]

Ya, just deny them score
I'd like fullscreen for this
With how the powercharge works, be nice to see more enemies coming in from the sides and behind

[cactus]

Nice looking game you've got here, Sean! I really like the style and the special moves (although it's a bit hard to perform some of them during the more frantic action without taking hits).

You should consider adding difficulty settings so that more hardcore players won't complain about the lack of difficulty. But from the GDC experience you're probably on the right track with letting people play regardless of skill

I noticed that you have the infamous weird graphic surface glitch, which can easily be fixed with draw_clear_alpha(c_black,0) before drawing to a surface.



I'd also suggest adding more animation to some of the enemies. Other than that, it's one fine ass game you've got going!

[th15]

Eh? That's odd. There's two surfaces at work here, one for post processing and one for a motion blur effect. Then there's a distortion effect too. The background gets darker like that when you get hit. But I don't know where all that pink around your ship is coming from! I want to avoid using draw_clear because that would destroy the motion blur effect.

Yea, I still need to create a whole bunch more enemies. This is just a demo of the combat system really.

The interesting thing about combos is that you are already being assisted to use them. In my experiments with combos I found that the most common way for me to screw up a combo was that I would hit the last key slightly too early (left up fire right instead of left up right fire) so I let the system accept the last two inputs interchangeably (so both of those combinations will trigger the special). I've been considering reducing it to 3 move combos but I think that would cause a lot of unintentional triggering of specials.

The other method is that I could bind a key for each special (currently WASD and VB are the alternate control scheme) but that means that the game will suddenly have like 11 input keys. Radiant Silvergun was a great game, fantastic bosses, but in my opinion the sheer quantity of weapons that you had to use was a little overwhelming.

So my solution for the difficulty of using specials is to make specials really really powerful for what they do. Currently I'm thinking about adding an effect where nearby bullets are cleared when you activate a special move.

(P.S: I finally completely Korea and Thailand in Clean Asia, separately. I clocked Thailand at 76 seconds The squid boss in China is still impossible though)

[Akhel]

I may implement some kind of score requirement to advance to the next stage (failure means replaying the level) but it's kinda up in the air.

Ah, that would be great. Kind of a "time trial" feel.

Also, one more little suggestion: The explosions don't seem to fit the style of the game very much. Maybe you should try something more abstract?

[serprex]

Ya, you could use draw_set_blend_mode_ext(10,10) with c_white to get a nice inverted color effect, praps draw the ship that dies for a few frames vanishing or something

[th15]

Just put up a new version of the demo. The music effects work now and the combo system has been simplified to 3 button combos. You only have to press two directions then the fire key now.

I've been thinking about explosions, maybe just simple polygons, I'm not sure what I'll do about those yet.

Do let me know how you guys feel about the combo system and the scoring system.

[th15]

Posted a new version with huge improvements. Please to be playing and commenting, yes?

[Ciardhubh]

Usually these kinds of shooters are pretty boring. But I like yours . The variety in weapons and the fact that you don't have to restart over and over again is nice. The effects are good, too.

A few things that struck me:

• Transistion between levels is very abrupt. The screen just fades out all of a sudden. I don't know if I had actually beaten the end boss or if it just stopped.
• It occassionally lags if there are a lot of enemies and effects; on an AMD 3700+, Geforce 8800GTS.
• The focused hammer shot seems to be less effective against single targets than the spreader. I'd expect the former to do more damage.
• Key layout is a bit inaccessible. If the various weapons where more in a straight line of keys than in different ones, it might be easier to use, e.g. a, s,d,f,g and q,w,e,r,t. Kudos for not using z/y and thus making it unplayable on QWERTZ keyboards, though.
• I occasionally hit "A" by accident. Maybe move the help screen to some place else and pause the game while showing it.