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[bkeegan]

 

• 9 Action Packed Levels: Play thru 9 varied levels.
• Over 100 Enemies: Bring the wrath of hot plasma to over 100 unique enemies.
• 3 Playable ships: Chose between 3 ships with unique abilities and weapons.
• Multiple Gameplay Modes:
•    Story Mode: Play the game in story mode. Play with a 3-hit health bar and load to the most recently checkpoint upon death. Progress is saved to be resumed on the next session.
•    Arcade Mode: No less important is the arcade mode. This provides a traditional arcade experience. Players will die upon one hit but have a total of 3 stock. Extends are available at various score levels. Achieve the almightly 1CC with the highest score possible.
•    Caravan Mode: Timed mode where waves spawn only after the one before it is completely off the screen. Go for the high score!
•    Practice Mode:  Immediately jump to any boss, miniboss or any level segment to practice for your 1CC run.
• Extensive Graphic Options: We try to create the best graphical experience possible, but no setup can be right for everyone. We believe in giving as many options as possible to help players enjoy our game
•    Selectively disable background items. Don't like the dust in level 3 for instance, you can turn it off.
•    Background luminosity settings. Find the background too distracting? This setting allows you to dim the entire background.
•    Player Hit Box Indicators: Want to know exactly where your hit box it, turn on an indicator in the settings.
•    Hit Flash Indicators: Change the color or disable completely the hit flash indicators.
•    Change between 30 and 60 FPS
•    Disable Debris: Find the debris distracting, they can be disabled
• TATE Mode: Stellar Fury is a vertical shoot 'em Up and no vertical shoot 'em up would be complete without TATE mode. TATE Mode allows you to flip the game by 90 degrees so that the game occupies the entire screen.
  

(NOTE: Game is in development and final feature list is subject to change)

[Alain]

Stellar Fury looks amazing, bkeegan. I played Raptor: Call of The Shadows for MS DOS to the death and the enemies in your screenshots have some similar qualities.

In short, I want it to be the arcade experience you remember - not the actual arcade game itself.

This is such a great concept of looking at making the type of game you are working on. I would love to achieve that, too (just with regards to a different genre's classics for the PC, not the arcade). Do you mind if I steal that quote from you?

[Schrompf]

Great style. The bars left and right made me fear that this is going to be a mobile-y shooter, but your posts says otherwise, so I still have hope. The GIF looks very hectic to me and not exactly "relaxing and uncomplicated", but I put my trust in you that you make it accessible to parents with a fulltime job, too :-)

What tech do you use?

[bkeegan]

Stellar Fury looks amazing, bkeegan. I played Raptor: Call of The Shadows for MS DOS to the death and the enemies in your screenshots have some similar qualities.

This is such a great concept of looking at making the type of game you are working on. I would love to achieve that, too (just with regards to a different genre's classics for the PC, not the arcade). Do you mind if I steal that quote from you?

Thanks! I've been working on this Since August 2019 but there were some breaks where I didn't work on it - as I said in my first post. It's been about 1 year of full time effort to date.

Raptor Call of the Shadows was definitely an influential game from my childhood/early teenage years. The disks are long gone but I think I still have the manual somewhere. Not that I directly pulled from that game, but considering I played that a ton in my youth - the impact is clear. Most of the designs are very angular and this is on purpose as they are quicker to draw. As I'm doing this solo, I got to be efficient where I can.

Go head and use that quote . I started out with more ambitious plans for this - but I really had to de-scope a lot of it if I want to get this done anytime this decade. I'm tried to narrow the focus on just trying to make it "feel" as good as possible and not be too frustrating and get rid of the "arcade jank". Just trying to execute something well that fans of the genre or retro fans in general might be interested in. 

[bkeegan]

Great style. The bars left and right made me fear that this is going to be a mobile-y shooter, but your posts says otherwise, so I still have hope. The GIF looks very hectic to me and not exactly "relaxing and uncomplicated", but I put my trust in you that you make it accessible to parents with a fulltime job, too :-)

What tech do you use?

Thanks The bars on the left are actually pretty common in vertical shmups. The purpose of this is that it narrows the vision to the center of the screen. Without these - it becomes very loosy goosey and unstructured. It's a bit of an optical trick - by putting these bars in, it makes the screen feel taller.  It's kind of like widescreen movies (back in the day where TVs were 4:3) - same trick.

"Relaxing" is maybe not the best word and I thought that when I typed it. Got to put it into context of other entries in the genre. Much of the genre is highly niche with very intense spreads of bullets filling the entire screen and they are just absolutely punishing. The GIF I put up there is actually a boss fight - so it's some of the toughest content I have to date. Shmups have a reputation for being brutally difficult and I felt like if I made a retro shmup that was easy, it would be an utterly betrayal of the genre. This game is being designed to both respect the genre but maybe be a bit easier to pick up in play.

As for tech. Game is in Unity, Graphics are done with Aseprite.
Edit: content editing is just plain text. My day job is managing financial software. I am no stranger to tedium. Developing editors would take too much development time away from developing my actual game. 

[bkeegan]

Latest boss to be added to Stellar Fury

[buto]

Very cool bullet pattern

[Schrompf]

Very cool indeed. And very cool #2 to "relaxing compared to bullet hell". I'm apparently even more oldschool, when you spoke about "classic shoot'n'ups", I had R-Type, X-Out in mind. Those were mostly done very well, hard but masterful balanced. BulletHell on the other hand is a genre from which I mostly stayed away.

[bkeegan]

Thanks! Looking at shoot 'em ups over the years - it seems they went a particular direction with the genre where we have bullet hell games. Even if they are not bullet hell - they are usually combo driven.

I found that the "classic shmup" genre seems relatively underserviced. I go back and I play a game line gradius and you think you're going back to a simpler time but you really have to be committed to playing a game like that. You die and you lose all your powerups - combine that with the checkpoints and you go back to a peashooter with no speed bonus right before a boss -  It's a tough pill to swallow unless you are really committed to the game.

My goal is to make a classic shmup that is difficult without being so punishing if that makes sense. I do want to introduce some form of persistent game advancement (i.e. unlocks) but I've yet to fully nail down exactly what I want. These kind of things can easily "break" the game. Development efforts to this point have been focused on the core gameplay itself.

[bkeegan]

Been spending the past few days working on a massive sprite for level 1.
Actual sprite is 2000x3000 pixels. Took quite some time to finish




Some gameplay footage

[NinjaKyat]

Haha looks very cool!

If I had to nitpick I'd say the UI takes up a bit too much space. It's probably meant to be like that to reduce the play area horizontally, right? Perhaps using a simple letterbox would look a bit cleaner, but I'm not sure.

Good luck with the game!

[bkeegan]

Thanks -

Yes, the bars on the side are there like you mentioned. Without them the game feels loosy goosy, unstructured and sloppy. The side bars has an optical affect of making the screen feel taller which is suitable for a vertical shmup.
Some vertical shmups are even more aggressive with the side bars.

I will have options where the player can change the side panels and will include a plain black box. I had it like that for a long time with just black bars before I had art. I will say the art makes the depth of the game seem greater by creating a visual layer - you look thru a panel into the game world.

[NinjaKyat]

Ah, okay - thanks for clarifying!

[Schrompf]

Seen the video now. Amazing! Maybe a bit to long before actual gameplay starts but that's just details. Shooting looks juicy, music is best fit. Only thing I'd love to see improved is the boss'es appearance. It would be much cooler and more obvious as to why one can't hit it just yet if you'd let it start from "below". Scale it larger as if it's rising, put a drop shadow below that moves away accordingly.

[bkeegan]

Last day I spent redesigning the player sprite and adjusting the starting bullet pattern.
Reasons for the sprite redesign were to A. make it a little bigger and change the color to something that doesn't blend into the scenery too much. Reason for this is to make it easier for the players eye to track. Also, I thought I could design something cooler.

The bullet type changed that basically transforms the bullet into a rectangle and the guns are further out from the base - this gives the player a wider hit area so smaller enemies aren't as tricky to hit.

New player sprite:



New Sprite in Action

[bkeegan]

Spent the recent time fleshing out the UI. Here's a short snapshot

[bkeegan]

Spent the last week or so working on better gamepad support. Not much to show in a screenshot for that but the entire game and all the menu systems are playable with a gamepad.

Been working on the level victory sequence last couple days


Follow on twitter: https://twitter.com/stellarfury

[Alain]

That victory sequence is very juicy, great job!

[bkeegan]

Spent the last couple days incorporating a second player ship into the game. The art asset is itself is actually from a previously canceled project.  I decided to start working giving these ships some more character by coming up with some information on their origin. I play to have many ships (much unlockable in the game) and I decided that I'd employ a few different styles and each style would be a different maker.

Here's the ship selection sequence in action:



Had fun cranking out some company logos. It's all just for flavor but I think it gives the game some extra character.

Going for a sports car vibe on the second one. Thought it would be cool if the history was that the company made racing and luxury ships before "the war"

[bkeegan]

Been working on some new ship designs. Trying to implement more designs that encourage more risk taking.
This new ship focuses on using enemy bullets. It has two attacks, one that uses the grazing mechanic to built the power level, another that can absorb bullets and expel them as a charge attack:

The Delta Mekane DM-G60 "Vindicator"





This other one has a stronger focus on using the shot limits by getting close to the targets to deal more damage:

The Terragalactica TG-SL350 "Viking"





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https://twitter.com/stellarfury