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[Montoli]

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Most recent build:  April 26

Recent changes:

• 8(!) new boss patterns added, in an "experimental" level.
• Turned off bloom effects for now, since they make it hard to see when bullets are dense.
  
• A lot of misc graphical and gameplay tweaks

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-------------------Original Post------------------------


Hello again!

So while I wait to see how long it takes to attract a sponsor for Boss Rush, I have decided that it would be fun to take some of the code and try making a more traditional shmup.  (The problem with playing a bunch of shmups for research is that now I really like them and want to try my hand at making my own...)

So!  This is the result of that.  Discerning readers may notice that at least a few of the assets are eerily familiar.

This is completely and utterly a prototype!  Don't expect too much yet!  While I have a game planned behind it, which may or may not get made, this is just a stab at one level.  All of the art assets are either scrounged from my last title, or obvious placeholders.  The UI alternately buggy or nonexistent, and most of the content was written sporadically during long commutes over the past week.

Be warned - he balance is .... possibly a little on the hard side.  At least by my standards?   I know I'll regret saying this, someone will come along and perfect it on the first try within 5 minutes...  It's hard to me at least, I still haven't gotten through without dying.  My record is only 3 lives lost.

Think of this as the programming equivalent of a "rough sketch".  You might be able to see the game it might become if you squint, but you'll have to squint pretty hard.

Most of the things I want to test with this build are:

• Is it fun?  (this is the important one)
• Are there any obvious things I'm doing wrong, usability-wise?
• Does the liquid metal effect work well, or is it too annoying?

Controls:
Arrow keys move
Shift key focuses  (Move slower and shots are more grouped)
Z key shoots
Playable link:  Link

The game doesn't reset after you kill the boss, so if you want to play again, you'll need to hit refresh to force it to reload.



Also, some screenshots:




Let me know what you think!

[mokesmoe]

Played it two times.
Took me a bit to find the controls and even died one before finding the shoot button.
Liquid metal looks nice.
Difficulty wise:
Before the boss I died once on both games. (not including first death)
Did well against the boss, but totally fail at last two forms. (silver bullet and mercury poisoning)
I like how you don't lose all your powerups when you die. I wish there was more powerups though, I get to max power very quickly.

A few bugs (mostly leftover boss rush stuff): Clicking makes a charge bar appear on the right momentarily, main menu is restart, options don't go low quality.

[Eraser]

Is it fun? Not especially. Just another bullet hell shmup with nothing that really sets it apart yet.

Anything you're doing wrong? Well, IMO flash is not the way to go for bullet hell shmups, as flash is quite... inefficient.

The effect does work quite well and is nice, but at some points it's a little crowded on screen (Think: second to last form of boss or so; only time I died )

Difficulty-wise it's OK. First run through, lost 1 life at the boss, beat it in like 4:50 or so. I do like shmups and play them too much I suppose ;P

[alspal]

I haven't really played a bullet hell game before. The effects were nice, but the graphics weren't amazing (obviously). It was quite enjoyable navigating through the stuff and collecting things, although it felt very slow paced and a little too easy (due to the slowness).
Also I lost a few lives at the boss, but I didn't get a game over?

[Loren Schmidt]

The problem with playing a bunch of shmups for research is that now I really like them and want to try my hand at making my own...

I really can't start any new projects at present... but now I really want to make one too :D .

This already has a pretty good feel to it. I played it a number of times, and found it pretty enjoyable. I did find myself wanting a few things when playing it, but this is certainly a promising prototype. I quite liked your enemy design and the attack patterns you used. This is one of the game's strengths. I think the number of different enemy types feels just about right- there aren't so many it feels messy, and there aren't so few it feels monotonous. It'll be great to see these enemies with their final visuals and effects.

Projectiles tended to be slow, so the game scaled by putting lots of them on screen. That's fine in theory, and I had a lot of fun for most of the level. But what I felt happened (and this is only my opinion) is that once there were enough projectiles on screen, it started being less about dodging and more about trying to guess the exact size and shape of the hit area. That combined with the fairly random nature of some of the boss's attacks led to some of my deaths later in the level feeling out of my control. Instead of blaming myself, I found myself feeling there was luck involved. This is probably the sort of thing I could get better at with practice. But in general, I'd intuitively say you'll get more of this sort of frustration when there are random elements which cause the difficulty level to vary. I guess I'd prefer it if the game relied more on deterministic attacks.

Consider me interested- if I have a few nitpicky observations, it's only because I know you're capable of lovely things. I look forward to future updates!


Oh, I forgot to mention one thing- I found myself largely ignoring the secondary fire because the primary did so much more damage. I also didn't feel I really had to work for powerups- I just played without paying particular attention to them, and I maxed out quite easily. Okay, enough nitpicks! Jeeze, feel free to dump a load of OCD criticism in one of my threads

[Terrorbuns]

I... uh... died once on my first play through. And that was only because I wasn't expecting Silver Bullet's shots to, you know, EXPLODE on impact with the edge of the screen. >_>

I enjoyed this, and I normally suck at Shmups/bullet hells. This one felt just right IMO. Needs more power ups though. The stage felt really long though :/

[mokesmoe]

Oh, I forgot to mention one thing- I found myself largely ignoring the secondary fire because the primary did so much more damage.

Wait what? There's a secondary fire?
Apparently i'm stupid and didn't read the controls.

Also it by "hit area" you mean the ships hitbox, there is a circle in the middle of the ship showing it.

[Loren Schmidt]

Wait what? There's a secondary fire?

Ah, I just meant the curtain of weaker fire that the little orbiters make.

Also it by "hit area" you mean the ships hitbox, there is a circle in the middle of the ship showing it.

Thanks, I didn't realize that. I thought it was quite a bit larger.

[mokesmoe]

Thanks, I didn't realize that. I thought it was quite a bit larger.

I only noticed it right away because I noticed it was different from the boss rush ship.

[Montoli]

Nice!  Thank you for the feedback everyone!

(And I'm humbled by the number of people who are already clearly better at my game than I am, judging from lives taken to clear. )

A few responses:

Is it fun? Not especially. Just another bullet hell shmup with nothing that really sets it apart yet.

Yup, right now it is largely a tech demo, where I'm making sure that I can handle enough collision math and graphic effects, while still maintaining a solid framerate.  (I test it on my 4-year old laptop usually, which helps keep me from getting too crazy.   But yeah, it is pretty generic at the moment.

I have a few ideas that I think I'll put in which should make it a LITTLE more interesting, but I'll freely admit that a lot of this is unabashedly "I wanna make a shmup".  So while I'm planning a somewhat nonstandard structure, it's still, at the end of the day, probably going to be a shmup.

(This whole thing is basically because I want to make all the bullet patterns that I couldn't use in Boss Rush because they were too powerful if someone intelligent was aiming them. :D)

The main "interesting thing" I'm planning on doing is using something of a megaman-style format.  So instead of a fixed order of levels, it will probably be more like "do them in any order you want", and "get a new gun you can equip whenever you beat a level."  (I'm also toying with the idea of getting defense items from levels too.)  Will this be enough to make it more than "just another shmup"?  Probably not, but it'll be fun to make.

Projectiles tended to be slow, so the game scaled by putting lots of them on screen.

Yeah, I freely admit that I'm cribbing from the Touhou style of bullet-hell.  Less about lightning reflexes, and more about slow but complicated patterns.

Oh, I forgot to mention one thing- I found myself largely ignoring the secondary fire because the primary did so much more damage. I also didn't feel I really had to work for powerups- I just played without paying particular attention to them, and I maxed out quite easily. Okay, enough nitpicks! Jeeze, feel free to dump a load of OCD criticism in one of my threads

OCD criticisms are the best kind of criticisms!  They help keep me honest! 

I'm very interesed that you felt like the wavy blue shots were less useful though!  (Even when holding shift, to focus them?)  They actually add a fair amount of damage, but that may be more obvious to me (knowing the code) than to people playing.

For the curious, here is the damage breakdown:

Main gun:  Fires 2 shots, every 3 frames.  Shots do 9 damage a hit.  (Total DPF [damage per frame] = 6)
Orbiting Blue things:  Fire 1 bullet every frame, which does 2 damage.  Fully powered up (all 4 orbs) that's 8 DPF.

Total DPF:  14  (6 from main shots, 8 from orbiting shots)

Also it by "hit area" you mean the ships hitbox, there is a circle in the middle of the ship showing it.

Just to confirm:  Yes, the little red circle in the middle is the hit area.  (I probably could have made this more clear...)  Actually, full disclosure: It's slightly smaller than that.  It turns out that even with the hit area visible, if I check for it exactly, people [including me!] try to cut it too close and get hit and feel annoyed.  So the actual hit area is like 2 pixels smaller than the RED (inner) circle.  8 pixels diameter.

Anyway, gotta run to catch a train now (and this is probably long enough a wall-o-text for now) but just want to say, thanks again for the feedback, even (and especially) the less fun parts!

-Montoli

[Montoli]

Random update:

I just added Bombs!



Will probably have a new build up sometime this weekend.  Am adding most of (or at least a bunch of?) weapons right now.

-Montoli

[X3N]

I thought the bullets that slowed down while changing shape then sped up were cool. Would prefer enemy bullet speeds to be significantly faster, good prototype though. Looking forward to what you make of it!

[st33d]

Quite fun. I like it.

Two thoughts:

Are you copypixeling the elements to render them? I get a bit of chug every now and then and I'm wondering if the game is hitting its limit or if it's an effect. Surely you would want unlimited action.

Is there any reason not to hold down the fire button? We've been having this discussion at work about the issue of the "hold a cup of coffee and play one handed" game. They're always the more popular games. Why would I want to stop firing? Who am I not supposed to shoot at?

The "feel" of the game is spot on. Definitely some good shmup work here. Keep it up.

[Montoli]

Update:  Didn't quite get to a point I want to post out a playable build yet.  Will probably be more like mid-week.

I got a lot done this weekend, but it turned out to be all foundation stuff.  Lots of removing code that was in BossRush that is no longer needed.  And a bit of "taking the time to restructure things the way I should have done in the firstplace, but didn't realize until I had too much built on it to change it".  Successfully performed at least 2 major code surgeries though.  (I. e. changed something fairly major in underlying base code, and then somehow got it working again after it broke everything. )

Re:  Drawing method - it's probably a chug, although I'm not sure it's directly related to the drawing.  (Without seeing it in front of me, I'm inclined to blame flash - possibly an inopportune garbage collection?)  My drawing method is somewhat wonky - while I do use bitmaps, I don't use copyPixels except in a few cases.  (I decided early on that I wasn't quite ready to give up scaling or rotation.)  Is it happening anywhere in particular?  (I know that the first form of the boss, Mercury Elemental, could use some optimization.)  In general it runs pretty well on my 4-year-old laptop (my general benchmark) but there are a few places where I went a little too crazy with graphical effects. :D

Re: Holding down fire at all times - Yeah, I've wondered about this one too.  There really are very few places where you don't want to be firing at all times.  (Although there probably will be a couple.)  Ultimately, I think it's sort of like the "accelerate" button on Mario Kart.  It's there more because the user feels like they should be actively doing something than because it's really necessary.

Maybe a menu option "autofire" would be in order?

[alspal]

Or you could make the button have more use, remember that a button has multiple states - being pressed, being held down, and not being pressed etc.

[st33d]

Anything you're doing wrong? Well, IMO flash is not the way to go for bullet hell shmups, as flash is quite... inefficient.

Crap.

I've made a bullet hell shooter in Flash with over 500 bullets on screen at times and it ran smooth as a baby's arse.

[alspal]

What's the game called?

[Loren Schmidt]

Regarding Flash's speed-
I use Flash primarily (mostly because of the convenience of distribution) and speed is certainly an issue for me. That's not to say that it's not possible to put a lot of stuff on screen at once- it'll just be more processor hungry than one might expect. If you use copyPixels() for drawing large numbers of objects, framerates can be improved significantly. But in Montoli's case this would mean giving up rotation, so I can see why he stuck with his current system.

But yeah, what I'm trying to say is that you're both right, and there's no need to be hostile. Flash is less efficient than many platforms, but at the same time it's quite possible to make fairly complex games (like st33d's lovely looking shmup) that will run well even on older hardware.

Montoli-
I totally agree with your thinking- I don't think you need to make your game 'new' or 'different' for it to be really worthwhile. There's a giant pool of ideas out there: some of them are new, and some of them are quite well explored. How new they are is quite independent of their quality. If you do a good job, and you love what you're doing, then the game will be really amazing.

Cheers!

[Curseman]

I think this is looking pretty good so far!  The boss has some interesting gimmicks.  Is the mouse supposed to do anything?  I notice that clicking it on the screen causes a meter on the right side of the screen to fill up, but it doesn't seem to do anything other than that.

I'm looking forward to boss rush, by the way, I think it's a really original idea.

[mokesmoe]

Is the mouse supposed to do anything?  I notice that clicking it on the screen causes a meter on the right side of the screen to fill up, but it doesn't seem to do anything other than that.

He reused the engine from Boss rush to make this game. The clicking stuff is just leftover code, it doesn't actually do anything.