Playable alpha version out! You can get it
here.
Bounty Runner is a Bullet Hell Shoot 'Em Up starring the bounty hunters Ark Tailwind and Fridan Bringer. Play through stages filled to the brim with colorful bullets, shoot down hordes of enemy machinery and collect the bounty from tough-as-nails bosses so the duo doesn't end up in the red due to their complete absence of financial thinking. Expect high speed high octane action.
As in all shmups, your character can move and shoot. There is a melee attack which is good for OHKO:ing enemies and clearing away missiles. There is also a shield which can be used to block enemy bullets for as long as there is energy left for it. On top of it, there is a focus button. Focus slows down the character, making it easier to cruise between tight bullet clusters. It also gives all other abilities a secondary mode. The weapon becomes more powerful at the cost of having a much narrower firing line. The shield detonates, clearing all bullets close to one and give a very brief invulnerability. The melee attack becomes a Battle Fury, a kind of smart bomb if you will.
As in all Bullet Hell games, the character's hitbox is small to compensate for the sometimes huge number of projectiles that gets thrown at the player. This does not change the fact that the game is hard, far from it. Bosses and enemies attacks with fierce and varied patterns, and can on higher levels often take quite a beating before going down. However, there are plenty of parameter the player can change; difficulty, starting lives/battle fury's, etc. making it a game even people new to the genre can enjoy (I hope).
Scoring is based around how aggressive the player is. Cutting up enemies and blocking bullets instead of shooting and dodging increases the "Aggression" multiplier, while getting as near as possible to a bullet without getting hit increases the "Graze" multiplier.
Bounty Runner is my debut project as a programmer, and I pretty much learned to program from scratch while creating it. This, coupled with lack of time and interest, has caused the game to take an ungodly amount of time to create (Soon starting on the 4th year). As I have matured both as a person and programmer, I intend to finish the game for once and for all. However, what drives me is the players, so all support and feedback I can receive is appreciated.
The game is in a playable build with two full stages, fully functional controls and a couple of working features. The game was for a long time programmed in Game Maker 8.0 Pro, but recently I got GM Studio from a friend as a donation, so I am still cleaning up a few glitches here and there caused by the porting, as well as doing some tweaks and balancing based on earlier feedback. Hopefully, I will have something out for everyone to try in March.
Currently, this is a one man project, with some occasional support from a few friends. However, as I can only make graphics and programming, the game is sadly awfully silent. If anyone is up for making some Metal music, send me a PM.
Very short gameplay video. If someone knows how to embed Youtube videos in a post, please do tell me.
If you have read through all of this, I sincerely thank you. Now back to fixing the replay system.
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