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[Stargoat]

It's been a few months since I've seriously worked on the project, and to be honest... I simply don't enjoy working on it any more.

Still, it's something I'm proud of, and hopefully it can provide joy or an interesting experience to someone.

So, here it is... representing one and two thirds of levels and two bosses, the fast-paced ASCII SHMUP:

Chaos Stream

An old video, with music by Syniphas:




Some screenshots:

[genericuser]

This is fantastic.

[BlueSweatshirt]

Excellent game!

With the speed of the bullets and their vastly varying hues, I sometimes found it very difficult to keep track of the hell raging on screen.

I found the stars distracting, so I quickly turned them off. They looked cool so I wish I could have kept them on. Perhaps make them darker so they're not so visually distracting?

[Stargoat]

Hey, thanks for the kind words

On the stars, I might add an option to darken them in a future update.

[Stargoat]

Yo, added a video:

[BoxTLG]

Excellent work, I just love space shooters

[Theon]

Looks amazing!

It's kind of like steampunk; An impossibly marvellous game, from a time that never was

[Stargoat]

Hah, that's certainly an interesting way to view it! 

[Amon26]

Nice stuff! takes me back to my 386 days! Any chance you could add a fullscreen feature?

[drChengele]

Now that's just plain awesome 

I made a pseudo-ASCII platformer prototype once, but unlike you I cheated and didn't restrict myself to actual character space (they could move smoothly and be scaled, which I used for parallax effects, which is not really ASCII art at all).

Needless to say, your way of doing things takes much more skill to pull off. In fact I would not have believed that ASCII can be so smooth before seeing this game. The animations are fantastic.

Keep up the good work.

[Geti]

This is legit. Good work, though I'm so bad at shmups, couldn't beat the second boss. Solid effort, though yeah the stars should be way way darker.

[Stargoat]

Glad you guys like it

Also, an update!
-fixed input bug
-fixed timeout bug on boss 2
-due to popular demand, reduced intensity of stars

If you want to keep your high scores and other settings, you can replace only the .exe and 'controls' data file.

[Detocroix]

This is awesome in so many levels! Congratulations on creating something far beyond "normal" game (And that is, art. )

[jph wacheski]

Greatness!

 

[Martoon]

This is fantabulous!  Like drChengele said, it's great that it's actually aligned to the character grid.  I'm always a little disappointed when I see ASCII-style games that don't do that.  The richness of style and motion you've achieved within that limitation is impressive.  Have you considered alternate sound effects that just use the gritty built-in PC speaker style sounds?

The difficulty is pretty brutal (even for a shmup), especially with the exploding shots.  It seems doable, though, once I learn the enemy patterns and take them out before they can fire much.  Still, pretty tough game.  I've made it a little past the first boss.

[Stargoat]

Balancing has been pretty hard (and probably needs further work? The second boss, especially, is too difficult for where it would 'appear' in the final version).

I think the main culprit is the low gameplay resolution - your ship's weak point is huge compared to other shmups, and to the things that will hurt you in the game, so skin of your teeth dodging is pretty difficult to pull off. If you see a lot of bullets coming your way, maybe it's best to avoid them altogether rather than slip between them, even if that means less hits on an enemy. You might still be able to recover with the energy shot, as it'll destroy most enemies that have taken even only a few hits.

But, as you said, the game is a lot easier when you have the enemy pattern down, and can take them out before they fill the screen up with too much bad stuff.

Remember also that you have the bullet-soaking bomb (mapped to c), so if you know of difficult areas before they occur, you might be able to budget energy to have enough for a bomb. It'll increase your score multiplier, too.

[drChengele]

Speaking as someone who plays bullet hell shooters on occasion, I had no problems with dodging, in fact I felt pretty much in control for the most of the game. When ever I failed to dodge through bullet waves it felt like it was my own fault, whether for not timing the dodge more carefully or for letting the enemies occupy too much of the screen.

[jice]

Totally amazing !! Can't wait to see more levels. The ship animations are unbelievable.
Do you intend to port it to Linux ?

[Stargoat]

thanks

While it is portable, I don't own a linux machine, so to answer your question, it's maybe possibly a might be a tentative perhaps.

[jamey]

I saw a video posted of this a long time ago, and I simply can't begin to describe how ecstatic I am that you are actively working on this and that there's a demo! I love the ASCII aesthetic so much. Cool to see you're working in libtcod, too, since I'm pushing out my first game on it right now using Python (http://bit.ly/ovcl9c for the thread if you're interested). What language are you using?