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[Schrompf]

Demo <3 I'll have a look as soon as I'm off work.

[bkeegan]

Hey Everyone,

Dealing with the initial round of feedback I got on the demo. I've released a patched version that addresses the most obvious issues and bugs.

https://figamesllc.itch.io/stellar-fury/devlog/303075/stellar-fury-alpha-011-release-notes

[bkeegan]

Hello,

After quite some time of bug fixes, I've had a lot of creative energy pent up - decided to take a break from the tweaks and bug fixes and spend some time on some new content. Original plan was the first 4 levels have enemies in the style of the earlier work I've published. Decided, why not change it up for level 3. First I made the boss as a giant sand worm




Decided why not change up the level enemies - decided the sandworm needed a group of loyal cultists. Had a a blast designing these guys


Here's the giant sand cruiser in action:

[bkeegan]

Been spending time developing stage 3 and the sand worm cultists:

[Schrompf]

This looks super hot! Great work! From the video alone I feel like I'm overwhelmed - blinking purple shots, green shots, rockets (?), and then some coins inbetween? And those blue coins appearing after a screen cleaner? I'm puzzled. And I have a gut feeling that cleaning up the colour coding and visual stability in this game might benefit the player.

But seeing that I typed nearly exactly the same in another shmup thread a minute ago, maybe I'm just getting old.

[bkeegan]

Thanks!

I spend a fair bit of time fiddling around with bullet visibility and tuning things just so. I will say that watching a shmup vs playing a shmup is different. When you play, you're eyes are up at top, scanning for threats and the dodging happens in your peripheral vision. I added a second bullet color recently - this is not just to make it more colorful, it has meaningful impact on bullet visibility. Slower/static bullets are green, faster and/or homing/aimed shots are pink. The color choice is 1-  the colors don't conflict with backgrounds I have, 2, they are complimentary colors to have a strong color contrast between the two bullets. When you have two colors like this, when patterns overlap, it's easier for your peripheral vision to read the patterns separately, vs getting muddled together. Adding the second color might seem like just messy color design/language, but it's relevant when it comes to bullet visibility and entirely intentional.


You've posted earlier in this thread so you might have noticed a shift - this is really a reflection of the journey of making this game and being immersed in the genre. When I started out, I had a much simpler understanding the genre. Grew up playing games like Galaga and R-type - felt like making a shmup I could focus more on drawing cool spaceships.

As I've gone along, my understanding of the genre and what makes them work has grown. Also my ability in playing these games has increased. There is a lot of particular mechanics that have become expected that at a cursory glance of the genre, won't be apparent. You mention the blue chips on the screen clear, they are score items (scoring is a big deal in shmups, and any true arcade genre). Taking about expected mechanics, bombs/screen clears typically come with 3 seconds of invulnerability as well.  So during this window, you do not have to worry about hitting bullets and can focus on grabbing chips and taking out whatever remaining enemies you need to deal with.

The challenge level in my game as gradually increased, that's a reflection of my ability to play these games. The earlier versions of the level become boring.

In general I decided to lean into just making it brutally hard. I think people generally come to this genre of game for a high level of difficulty and for me it's the most fun to design.

I do want to make an attempt at making it approachable to someone more novice. I introduced a rank system recently that based on your performance will ratchet up the difficulty level. Outside the arcade context , this might seem like I'm punishing good performance - but keeping in mind that arcade games are all about high scores. More enemies = more scoring potential - so spawning in more enemies and/or tougher/higher point yield enemies is a reward.

I also renamed the "Normal" difficulty to "Hard" and Novice became "Normal" - really just to set the players expectations.
Normal (formally novice) has bullet cancel when an enemy is destroyed (all the bullets spawned from a particular enemy are cleared when the enemy dies). It also carries a rank cap so even if they perform optimally, it the overall difficulty level will be capped.

I am pretty generous in giving the player extends/1ups, shields and bombs. The idea is that it might be relatively easy to 1cc given that I am generous with these, but no-missing (i.e shmup for not dying) a level, will yield a much higher score. This way players who just want to play thru it and don't care about score optimizing can do so and it's not too punishing (well, at least for a shmup), but gives more for players who are looking for more.

[oldblood]

My initial reaction to this was definitely Raptor: Call of the Shadows which I played as a kid (now available on Steam, btw). Had to go back to the earlier posts to see if it was a reference and it was. This will probably tug at the nostalgia strings for a few people. Keep up the awesome work.

[bkeegan]

Thanks

I can't count how many times I've been told my game gives off Raptor call of the shadows vibe and/or old dos game vibes. I definitely played a lot of that as a kid as well - along with loads of other dos games... at least ones that I had enough extended memory for 

I didn't set out to make a raptor inspired game, but I think just having a long history of playing dos games, it's reflected in my art style.
 

[bkeegan]

Spend some time working on the players weapons - trying to make them more polished and dynamic. First I made the double focus color different to more clearly show increased DPS.

Also added a bullet slow effect to the double focus beam that charges an ability that if timed correctly will fire off a small bullet cancel bubble (yielding point items). Ability has a charge meter attached to it that if deplete will incur a wait penalty before recharging.

[bkeegan]

Took some gameplay footage tonight. Still been working on the players weapons and abilities. Video shows off some of these changes as well as the rank system that scales the difficulty up and down based on performance.

[bkeegan]

Playing thru level 1 again, even the low rank boss was pretty hard. I decided to add a third tier of bosses. This one is an ultra low tier. Had to intentionally make him easy - which is tricky to design for because you can't use your own skill level as a gauge.




Also made this other new enemy just for fun. Regular enemy but he subs out the first midboss if your rank is really low:

[bkeegan]

Hey Everyone,
Just release Alpha 0.2 of Stellar Fury - appreciate any feedback!
https://figamesllc.itch.io/stellar-fury/devlog/326931/alpha-02-release

[Schrompf]

Wanted to download it, but the File "stellarfury_a0.2_12202021.zip" on Itch.io page is just text, not a clickable link? Weird.

[bkeegan]

Wanted to download it, but the File "stellarfury_a0.2_12202021.zip" on Itch.io page is just text, not a clickable link? Weird.

Weird - itch doesn't give me any options - I just assumed it was a clickable link. You can download the demo from the main page though:
https://figamesllc.itch.io/stellar-fury

[Schrompf]

I tried it. Well... where do I start?

1.3GB. There's probably a lot of room for optimisations. But that's ok for later.
Started it. Took like 10s, then the screen went greenish, then another 10s, then black, then another 5s, then main menu.
Started fullscreen desktop resolution, which is nice, but the first click to "Apply" without any changes in the graphics section reduced it to minimal windowed in unreadable size.
Keyboard is mapped to ZC by default, which is half a meter across on German keyboards. Remapped it to YC, which was ok, even though the dialog was confusing. I expected to click and type the new key, but there was some intermediate step.
I couldn't map X to it, though, it kept complaining that X was already used, but it's not visible anywhere in the keyboard menus.
Clicked some other button by accident, which opened another panel and somehow blocked input on the options menu. You really need to visibly disable every button in the background.
Alt+F4'd at this point because I didn't find what I needed to close in order to continue using the menu.
Restart.
Tried the help button. Tells something about four (!) different fire buttons. Oh boy, I sense this game is not for me. I just want to shoot things.
Finally clicked "Play". Some babbling about level caps and missions? Do I care? I don't know!
Mouse clicks didn't do anything here, from here on I pretty much advanced by button mashing YXCSpaceCtrlShiftWhateverWorks.
Weapon selection... I wasn't able to select anything, a lot of explanations going on, you really need to hide weapon options behind some ingame progress.
Weapon selection simply stopped taking commands at some point, maybe 20s later screen went dark and actual game begun.
I had some hefty panels left and right, and a mighty shooting ship in the middle on a black background, and then... nothing? Waited for a minute or so, admired the fireworks going off when I press Space, but no enemies, no backgrounds, nothing.

Sorry this feedback isn't more encouraging. The videos really look like this could be fun, but I didn't make it to the fun parts. I was thoroughly lost.

[bkeegan]

Hey - thanks for giving it a try!
Sorry the game wasn't working well for you. It sounds like for some reason it had an error loading the level event information (hence why there was no background/enemies). Not sure why this is happening - have not had anyone else have this issue. I will prob go thru the code and try to figure out what it might be doing.

I'm still working on UI and specifically better player feedback/instructions on how the mechanics work. Honestly, there gameplay is designed to be fairly straight forward - basically shoot everything/don't die. Rank goes up the more you destroy enemies you destroy, down when you die.  Higher rank increases difficulty (more and/or tougher enemies spawn) - including different bosses/midbosses. This design is meant to improve approachability for newer players but give some depth for more advanced players.

As for the weapons, most of the time you're firing your standard attack or focus attack. Standard attack can be configured in the options to always fire to avoid the keypress. I don't have this on by default because I feel it removes the choice of the player whether or not to shoot (even though they generally always want to shoot). It's really for players who want to optimize their 1cc run.

[bkeegan]

Last couple weeks been focusing on the changes that will be in our next demo update. These are mostly bug fixes and quality of life improvements.

Bullet Visibility:
Changed bullet assets to improve overall visibility. Been a long time coming and I've put it off long as I could but I changed the bullet graphics to be more visible. I leverage both light/dark as well as color contrast to make them more easily readable from the players peripheral vision. I added a style option to the bullet config panel and the previous bullet style can be enabled if desired



Expanded Graphics Options:
I've been expanding the amount of graphic options that are available.

• Bloom settings can be enabled/disabled per item as well as now having an option to adjust the overall intensity
• Explosion/debris size can now be adjusted as well as debris amount
• Death explosion flashes and bomb flashes can now be turned off

Practice Mode:
I've begun implementing a practice mode. This is where the player can attempt any section of any level or any boss/midboss:




Beyond this there are a number of bug fixes and optimizations. I significantly cleaned up some of the object pooling to improve load times and decrease memory usage.

[bkeegan]

Hey - we've release alpha 0.25. Complete list of changes is detailed here:
https://figamesllc.itch.io/stellar-fury/devlog/330859/stellar-fury-alpha-025-released

[bkeegan]

Hello,

After quite some time dealing with bug fixes and incorporating feedback from playtesters, I thought it was high time I grind out some new content. I've been working on the level art and enemy design for level 5. I've been trying to give these guys a theme and these ones have a theme of "Geometry" - i.e. bullet patterns have sharp lines and often form shapes.

Giffys below!

[bkeegan]

Hey everyone,

Been a bit since I've posted updates in here - been real busy.

I just released 0.4 the other day which officially moves it into "Beta". While this is really an arbitrary definition, and the game is still very much a work in progress - it has come a long way in the past 6 months

There has been a lot of changes in the past few updates - I'll highlight the big ones


0.3: https://figamesllc.itch.io/stellar-fury/devlog/340823/alpha-03-release
0.3 mostly contained lots of bug fixes and optimizations.  It also included a revamp of the difficulty settings



0.35: https://figamesllc.itch.io/stellar-fury/devlog/343106/alpha-035-release
This introduced ultra-wide screen monitor support as well as more bug fixes.
Biggest visual change was that I color shifted half of the red/teal enemies to blue/gold - to add more visual variety and interest.
This version also removed bloom entirely from the game.


0.4: https://figamesllc.itch.io/stellar-fury/devlog/350045/stellar-fury-now-in-beta-v04-release
This updated introduced a completely overhauled scoring system, an updated help section and a tutorial mission as well as better audio/visual ques.
Scoring system is now centered around the "double-focus" mechanic. Full details can be found in the change log