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[Dragonmaw]

This game is completely changing my opinion of you. Fantastic.

[Jason Rohrer]

This game is completely changing my opinion of you. Fantastic.

Can I use that as a quote to promote the game?   

[William Broom]

--Changed so that hearts are knocked off higher self when hit to thwart the
  heart rush exploit.

Haha, I did this so much. I'm glad you changed it though since it was a pretty cheesy tactic.

[Dragonmaw]

This game is completely changing my opinion of you. Fantastic.

Can I use that as a quote to promote the game?  

If you want! You can even use my real name and affiliation if you want (James Murff, BigDownload.com). Up to you.

I'm seriously impressed with the direction the game is going in and just how ridiculously fun it looks. Eagerly anticipating this.

Edit: It's also worth noting that I'm not especially fond of your other games (like Gravitation and Passage, although I recognize their contributions), and have criticized you both here and elsewhere.

[Jason Rohrer]

Not sure if anyone has the drive to play this one more time tonight.  The plan is to release it tomorrow...


Download here, same codes.

http://insideastarfilledsky.net/testDemo/


Changes:

Version 12   2011-February-17

--Enemy base bullet speed now gradually increases, between levels 20 and 80,
  up to being equal to player's bullet speed (before, enemy bullet speed was
  always half player bullet speed).

--Fixed to eliminate easy 1-descent token doubling by reducing base level of
  tokens that are on the floor inside a token.

--Changed base level of sub-tokens inside enemy tokens to mirror the new
  player token distribution system (it really didn't make sense before).

--Increased difficulty modifier inside sub-token recursions.

--Capped heart bonus on knock-down to 8, to prevent gigantic heart bonuses
  that make you effectively invincible on higher levels.

--Fixed level difficulty modifier number overflow issues (thanks Jimmy
  Andrews).

--Fixed power-set sum overflow issues (thanks Jimmy Andrews).

--Fixed power-up level numbers so that they don't overflow.  Added a bar-graph
  style powers-of-ten display, along with three most significant digits.

--Fixed enemies getting stuck in corners after dodging.

--Fixed bug in health bar length when heart picked up right before rising.

--Fixed bug in token update when a sub-token picked up right before rising
  (thanks Alexey Zubkov).

--Token sub-level colors now stay updated to match token as it changes (upon
  reentering token).

--Fixed a potential crash when game directory is read-only.

--Fixed glitch in the way explode and cornering were being combined.

--Tutorial now mentions IJKL movement alternative for lefties.

[Jason Rohrer]

Going to release the game in a few hours.

Wanted to gather people's reactions to this part of the website:

http://insideastarfilledsky.net/bulletPoints.php

Thoughts, criticism, gut reactions, etc?

Also, I'm thanking the following playtesters (just those who took the time to send me recorded games).  Let me know if I missed anyone or spelled your name wrong or whatever.  Probably best to email me if you want something changed  (jasonrohrer AT fastmail DOT fm).

Alexander Bruce, Alexey Zubkov, Allen, Aloshi Aloshied, Andrew McClure, Ben Leatherman, Bennett Foddy, Chris Klimas, Christian Knudsen, Daniel Benmergui, Daniel Stubbs, Dave Evans, Destral Minare, Eric McQuiggan, Farbs, Ian Snyder, Jason Tam, Jimmy Andrews, John Nesky, Lauren Serafin, Liam, Madeleine Burleson, Manuel Jose, Mark Johns, Michael Brough, Michael Molinari, Miroslav Malesevic, Nate Kling, Nicholas Feinberg, Nicholas Rodine, Quicksand Games, Richard Lemarchand, Rico, Rod Humble, Salade, Stephen Lavelle, Will, William Broom, Zarawesome


Also, I realize that this is a public forum and all.  If you don't want your name listed even here in this post, email me and I'll edit it out ASAP.

[aDFP]

Thoughts, criticism, gut reactions, etc?

That's just perfect. All the best with the launch, Jason. I know I'll be buying it.

Dan

[Dragonmaw]

Would it be possible to get a review copy for the site I work for?

[Christian Knudsen]

Yeah, those bullet points are perfect. While they do describe the game, they also leave you with a lot of questions and build curiosity.

Good luck with everything! I have a feeling this game will be big...

(I also have a feeling this game would be perfect for XBLA, and another feeling that it'll be part of the next Humble Indie Bundle!)

[Jason Rohrer]

Would it be possible to get a review copy for the site I work for?

Sure, and for anyone else who wants to review it, email me and I'll set you up:

jasonrohrer AT fastmail DOT fm


Oh, and yeah, this beastie has been released:

http://insideastarfilledsky.net/

Thanks again for helping me test it.

[deathtotheweird]

you left a comma out after Manuel Magalhães and before Mark Johns

congrats on the release, hope it goes well for ya.

[JamesGecko]

This game is brilliant and I feel bad that I'm not really enjoying more.

I keep getting into situations where I'm stuck in a corridor with an enemy shooting at me, and no way to get past. Unless I go down a layer. Then I discover that the enemy is actually kinda crappy and all the powerups are really awesome. Clearly, it's time to modify a powerup. Things Happen and before I know it I'm in who knows what at level -4 with +26 difficulty and there's a danmaku boss convention in the wide open space right outside my little rabbit hole.

I don't know. It's a combination of having to keep track of everything you've done and the long corridors that don't leave you many options, and the stack-based powerup system. Despite having an absurd amount of control over the world, I feel extremely helpless.

[Jason Rohrer]

Thanks for the tip about the missing comma.

JamesGecko:

Here's a tip, which may or not be clear until you've played for a while.  Every time you re-enter something, you get a fresh roll of a new level inside that thing (like a fresh dream inside the enemy's head).  That means a different set of enemies to face in there and a different set of power-ups on the floor.

Yes, when you enter an enemy, the power-ups on the floor in there are generally very high-level.  Getting past an enemy this way is NOT supposed to be a cake-walk.  BUT, by thinking about the situation that the enemy was in that made it difficult to face, you can pick the best available option, not really to *weaken* it, but to change it so that it is less well-suited to its situation.  So, if an enemy is in a tight space with high bounce, it's much better to give it high spread.  Whereas an enemy out in the open with high spread might be less of a threat if it had high bounce.

So, seeing all high-level power-ups might make you think, at first, "Oh man, these are all too high!  Now I've got to enter them too."  But you actually have two other options:

1)  Pick the best available powers that are there to change the enemy.

or failing that (which can happen sometimes)

2)  Exit the enemy and enter it again for a re-roll.


From a design perspective, the "re-roll" isn't necessarily a grind strategy, because you never know what you're going to encounter in there, and for all you know, you might encounter another enemy down there that is too hard to pass, which you will need to enter, etc.  So, re-roll has risk!  But that's where the interesting decisions are supposed to come in.

Unfortunately, as I playtested this game over and over, people got better and better at it.  Some of the people played it 100+ times.  So I had to keep tuning the game to deal with issues that they, the "hardcore" players, had encountered.

The upshot of that process is that the game is really tuned toward hardcore, expert-level play, and it can be kinda brutal on someone who hasn't figured out the basics of how something works.  Like, enter power-ups a few layers deep and suddenly find +36 difficulty modifier.  Whoops!

Some of that is weakened a bit during the tutorial, but once the player has completed the tutorial, all bets are off about what kind of player they might be (expert or whatever).


There's also a bit of a "trap you in a helpless situation" problem with this game that is NOT present in other hard games, because those games actually kill you and make you start over.  Like, jumping into a snake pit in Spelunky---you're only helpless down there for a few minutes until you die!

But if you jump into a "snake pit" in my game, well, you're stuck down there until you figure out how to work your way back out.  It's always possible, but it might be really hard and require a lot of thought.  It's kindof a difficulty "cliff" though.

I've thought about making this a permadeath game, which would fix that problem.  However, there are other situations where just getting "knocked down" and then getting another chance to face the same problem again that you failed at works really well.  In Spelunky, if you get stuck facing a really hard configuration and then die, you get a totally new world next time, and you are never forced to actually figure out how to get through that particular, difficult situation that got the best of you last time. Of course, it's balanced by the fact that you lose all progress on the re-roll, including cool stuff that you picked up.  But "death" in Spelunky is sometimes a relief!  A fresh chance!

There have been some suggestions of "get knocked-down three times in a row ends the game" or something like that.  I'll think about it some more.

But I will say that if you do get stuck in a snake pit in my game and DO eventually figure your way out of it.... that final moment can be an amazing feeling.  There's a big question about whether that payoff is worth all the helplessness and frustration that preceded it, though.

[Christian Knudsen]

So... Did you like Inception?

[Jason Rohrer]

So... Did you like Inception?

Funny!  Actually, no, I found it really disappointing.  I'm a big dream guy---I even own a "lucid dreaming mask" and all.

http://www.lucidity.com/novadreamer.html

So I thought that the movie didn't feel dream-like at all.  I think there were moments in Vanilla Sky that hit much closer to home, for example.  Or, of course, Waking Life.  Oh, and my goodness, who can forget The Science of Sleep!

ANYWAY, I was already thinking along the "recursive game where you can enter anything" line for a number of years, and then I found myself reading Goedel, Escher, Bach.  And then I saw Inception shortly after that, and it kind of hammered the idea home.  Like all these things came together to reinforce the "game about entering things" idea.

Inception did get part of the "forget what you were doing in the first place" thing, but it was spoiled by constantly showing cut-aways to what was happening on the outside.  So the audience was never allowed to forget.  I guess he sorta pulled a lot of punches there.  He did not hold the audience's hand this way in Memento, but instead just let the audience flounder along with the main character.

Anyway, my game allows you to forget what you were doing in the first place...

[aDFP]

Interesting what you said about Inception. I'm wondering now if you've seen Paprika, which was, of course, one of Nolan's strongest influences http://www.sonyclassics.com/paprika/

Also, every game designer should read Godel, Escher, Bach

[Dragonmaw]

So, I've been playing the copy you sent me. Needless to say, I'm seriously impressed with how good this came out. I love that it's so recursive that you often forget what floor you are on and what you are doing. It really lends to the dream-like atmosphere of the game.

[Christian Knudsen]

Yeah, a lot of people seem disappointed by the dreamworld of Inception being too restrained. I can see that being disappointing if those were the expectations you had, but the narrative container for the film is basically that of a heist movie, so it needed clearly defined rules and a somewhat grounded dreamworld. I don't think that story would have worked as well as I feel it did if it was placed in the dreamworld of Science of Sleep, for example. It would be interesting to see Gondry have a go at his own version of Inception, though.

Also, I feel Memento is almost as structurally constrained as Inception. You've basically just got two parallel narrative threads. One moving backwards, the other moving forwards. And they're even visually separated by one being in color and the other being black and white.

But, yeah, anyway...

I think I need to finally read Godel, Escher, Bach.

EDIT: As to the game, I hate that I suck so bad at bullet hell shooters. I love the mechanics and the basic ideas in the game and really want to play around with them.

[Dragonmaw]

As an aside, I don't think permadeath is a good choice. When I get downed and enter myself, it feels like I have a chance to re-evaluate the challenge, repurpose my ship for it, and continue. As you said, it's like climbing out of the pit instead of being impaled on the spikes.

II do think that it lacks an overall objective other than "continue exploring," which is fine by me but which may put off other, more casual players.

[unsilentwill]

Wow. Recursion, systems, fractals and all that were always interesting to me, and this game illustrates the concepts brilliantly. I've always had actually caring about them though as they don't seem to apply to reality, so Godel, Escher, Bach seems like something I need to read as well to fully appreciate this game. Without that background though, it does seem like a shmup that gives you a headache.

I'm curious why this hasn't gotten any press yet, it's technically brilliant.