Glad to hear that you enjoyed it despite not being a huge run 'n gun fan! I struggled trying to implement fall-through platforms seamlessly, so it's definitely not just you. Most of the solutions I came up with were either needlessly complicated/wasteful, like an extra button, or clunky/unintuitive, such as double tapping. In the end I just said fuck it and went with the standard implementation, because it has the benefit of familiarity if nothing else. Stage 2 mid-boss is the only boss that's designed around such vertical movement, so hopefully it won't be a problem overall.BulletMagnet wrote:Someone on here mentioned this one recently and I gave it a shot; I'm generally not big on run-n-guns, but off the cuff I enjoyed it, the feeling of the controls is different from most such games I've played but allows for much more agility when it comes to bullet-dodging, so I've experienced considerably fewer "pressed jump a frame too early, too bad" deaths than I normally do.
One thing that I have had a bit of trouble with is jumping down through platforms while under pressure; I understand why the down-jump command requires some precision so you don't accidentally drop into a baddie you're aiming down at, but I've lost a lot of lives at the second-stage midboss because it took me too long to react and get out of his way. Maybe it's just me needing practice.
Thanks for the honest feedback!Vanguard wrote:Credit fed through this on intense a few days ago. I'm not sure the danmaku/platformer hybrid really works, threading the needle between bullets is awkward when you've got gravity to contend with. I find Ghouls 'n Ghost's thin vertical line to be a more intuitive way to handle tiny hitboxes in a platformer. Maybe I just need more time to get used to it. I like the relatively flat difficulty curve. In a lot of arcade games by the time you're ready for the last stage, the first half is a joke. Here it feels like you could consistently no-miss the final boss and still have trouble in stage 3.
Since you can shoot diagonally with the green weapon, it feels off to me that you can't do that with the others. Boghog, are the default weapon drops your recommendations for what to use? I got the feeling that that was the case. Maybe they're intended for score since switching to something else would waste valuable time? I liked the way your weapon only powered down rather than being lost altogether when you lose a life. In a scrubby credit fed clear losing my weapon was still a big problem, but in serious 1CC play I bet it's pretty forgiving of little mistakes here and there. I notice that the booster stays active as long as you hold the button down, but it doesn't necessarily stop as soon as you release the button because there's a minimum distance. What was the reasoning behind that choice? Micro-boosts would allow for a higher performance ceiling.
Redline's biggest weakness for me is that the stages tend to be a bit forgettable. Nothing ever stood out as bad, it just felt like I was doing essentially the same thing throughout the entire game. The elevator section was the only part where I really felt things meaningfully changed up. I like that destroying one of a boss's parts just destroys that part and he can't shoot with it anymore. With 99% of action game bosses these days once you destroy a boss part or kill their minions or whatever, they become enraged and even more dangerous. It's fine to do that, but I liked revisiting the old way of doing things here. I don't Redline is a bad game at all, but I gotta be honest, I'd only recommend it to someone who had already played all of the run and gun genre's luminaries and was still hungry for more. Might be worth playing for score? From a single playthrough I got the impression that the scoring system is meant to be a major part of the game, but personally it's something I don't have much interest in.
Oh shit nice catch, didn't realize that V was hard coded as pause, will have to fix that asap and add the down-jump into the tutorial + max power indicator while I'm at it.BareKnuckleRoo wrote:Okay, playing this now currently.
Very smooth game so far, cute player character. I notice the default controls in the readme suck (jump on space is too weird with ZXC controls). Sadly, I notice V is perma mapped to pause but I can remap to use ZXC for Boost/Jump/Shoot with an alternate key like Numpad Insert on pinky to special.
Boosting feels off. You have to commit to a slight dash on the ground and can't cancel it immediately by pressing away like you can in Mega Man X or Moo Mesa, and if you jump during a dash you REALLY commit to it since you can't control your movement until the end of the jump. Or if you fall off a platform during a jump. Since there are land mines at certain spots, the inability to stop jump boosting and control your movement feels extremely unwieldy and dangerous for a game that sometimes requires pretty fine precision to jump dodge stuff. I'm not a fan of boosting in this game as it currently works and I'm going to actively avoid boosting whenever possible.
The lack of diagonal shooting on two specific weapons feels rather... I dunno, archaic? It feels like there's a better, more fun way to differentiate the weapons while balancing around an 8 way shot like a traditional run and gun. The weapons themselves feel pretty fun though and I don't think giving 8 way to the other weapons would break things significantly considering the green weapon is still decently strong and the only one to have a shield. The red weapon is a massive liability in stages due to its blind spots.
Would like some kind of max power indicator when you're actually maxed out, picking up while at max doesn't give a cue other than not changing the weapon.
You can't change sound levels when ingame.
When pressing diagonal down + jump you should jump down a ledge instead of jumping straight up.
Music and sound effects are great and I really like the graphics. The bosses so far feel pretty fun too!
It's a really good game, and you've got some solid core ideas with the special attacks, just needs a few tweaks to really become truly special I think. I can tell there's some great subtle mechanics at work that show knowledge of shmups, such as some enemies bullet cancelling, and I think a major overhaul of how boosting works would really improve things.
Current best is the elevator on level 4 on one credit. I really appreciate how when you pick a different weapon you still power up the weapon.
I notice the air quickfall tech (down + jump while in air, diagonal OK) isn't told in the tutorial - potential oversight? I discovered it by accident.
The slight commitment on the ground is manageable, but the massive full-on commitment in boost jumping makes it feel completely unusable for precision gameplay since you can so easily jump into a spray of bullets.Is the slight commitment on the ground a major issue, or is it mainly the boost-jump commitment that's the deal breaker?
It would also get away from some weapon select forcing that happens at some of the more hectic spots, where the red weapon clearly isn't intended to be used. The stage 4 elevator requires a lot of special use to cancel the bullets if you went with red for the first wave, and in stage 5 the red weapon denies your ability to deal with the grenade throwers in a timely fashion, which blue can special down or green can sweep. If you're worried 8 way shooting will render the weapons less distinctly useful, I don't think that'll be the case, but you could make red a bit thinner and make green's bullets wider to make them still feel distinctly advantageous for different targets, even with 8 way shooting.I'll play around with it and see what I can do. I think you're right, the game isn't "methodical" enough to suffer much from 8 degrees of shooting freedom
Not surprised to hear that you'd already put thought into all that stuff. Even in my initial playthrough I got the impression that very little of what was in the game was an accident.boghog wrote:Thanks for the honest feedback!
There are some strong tensions between platforming and bullet hell patterns and mechanics for sure. The way I attempted to alleviate it is to focus primarily on macro-dodges and quick kills. The problem is that unlike autoscrolling shmups, manual scrollers lack the natural dynamics that incentivize quick kills because you can slowly scroll small groups on screen and safely kill them. You're right about the importance of scoring, it's what is meant to lead the player into that fast, macrododgy, quick killy playstyle since all that's required for good scores is going fast and killing everything.
The weapon drops are what I preferred using or balanced the sections around, so they are recommended but not optimal. The score multiplier freezes while a weapon item is on screen, so switching weapons doesn't steal any precious puntos.
The idea behind the green weapon is to have kind of a "scrubby" safe weapon that's very effective for casual playthroughs but becomes less useful when playing for score. In retrospect it's probably not the best idea since losing all those extra aiming directions feels like getting cheated. Giving the other weapons that ability would make green useless. I didn't want the boost to turn into a glorified sprint button, the rationale is a mix of trying to give it a feeling of inertia, and wanting to give it tradeoffs for when you incorporate it into your routes.
What would make the stages more memorable in your opinion? The tendency of run n guns to change up their gameplay styles or turn into straight up platformers has always been a big pet peeve of mine so I tried to avoid that, may have gone too far in the other direction and made them too indistinct. Glad you appreciated the boss parts destruction not making the fights harder and the more evenly distributed difficulty, both were very much deliberate!
It's actually surprising to me how reasonable the difficulty turned out to be, playtesting done by my "what's a 1cc?" friends gave me a very wrong idea about the game's difficulty, even made me tone down a lot of stuff. Though this is a good thing, I wanted it to be closer to Shock Troopers than Metal Slug 3 in overall 1cc difficulty, even if the type of difficulty is very different.BareKnuckleRoo wrote:Thanks, it's not the hardest run 'n gun I think to just go for a 1CC because if you play it slower, you can manage everything pretty well or speedkill the dangerous stuff. It's not like some where hitboxes can be quite large or enemies very fast; here everything's quite reasonably manageable to learn if you're careful, but where the real challenge comes in is learning to play for score which changes how the game plays as you're constantly rushing through at a mad pace with the Vanquish style boosting. I really like the difficulty where it's at! It hits that sweet spot a lot of shmups do where the game is pretty approachable to learn for survival play but truly amps up the challenge when mastering the scoring system.
Very much appreciated!BareKnuckleRoo wrote:I appreciate the soundtrack download. Threw some cash your way for the game.
Implemented almost everything now, with the exception of the crouch boost. I don't particularly like how it functions atm but it had to be done for balancing purposes, otherwise the player can simply crouch-boost their way through a lot of the game, going under enemies while being safe from their shots. It's one of those inconvenient compromises like the input for falling through platforms overlapping with shooting down.BareKnuckleRoo wrote:In my opinion, it just needs a few more tweaks to be perfect. I'd make boost jumps function as follows:
• Jumping while boosting moves you at full speed regardless of whether or not you are holding a direction when you jump. You only change/slow your forward momentum if you press the opposite direction while in midair, rapidly slowing you down to a stop. You can quickdrop out of a boost jump to immediately reset/lose all forward momentum. Holding boost when you land immediately boosts you forward again as soon as you touch the ground.
The issue I noticed before where holding down and tapping boost does a standing boost, not a crouching boost during the first portion of the boost is not fixed in version 1.1, which can cause you to smack in you bullets you'd otherwise dodge by neutral/diagonal down boosting.
Congrats on the 1cc! Really happy to hear that the game grew on you. Try it out the new update if/when you can, I'm interested in hearing your thoughts on the updated boost-jump mechanics and whether or not you're more inclined to boost around after those changes.Vanguard wrote:Alright, I've put some time into this and have a proper 1CC. Would've been a one life clear if not for a mishap with trying to jump up while shooting down, but oh well. My fault not the game's fault. Anyway, this is better than I gave it credit for. I guess it's not surprising that an arcade-style game wouldn't show its worth while credit feeding. Now I can give better feedback. I'll even get the name right this time, believe it or not.
The enemy homogeneity is something that's a sore spot for me, you're definitely right that few enemies that require unique strategies to take down or combine with the terrain in interesting ways, especially for survival play where you can afford to stand back and play it safe. It's partly the result of settling on a set of rules to make it feel more bullet hell shmup-like, such as giving everything low HP, giving everything small hitboxes and giving the player overwhelming firepower. It's actually interesting just how much of a difference the hitbox size makes in games like this, where in Contra a few bullets and minor changes in terrain could create very different situations by blocking off parts of the screen and forcing you to move, in Redpulse the equivalent requires huge bullet vomit, unreasonably large attack hitboxes, or delayed effects like flames. Both the grenade and 2 HP jumping enemies are late additions meant to address this exact problem. This and the terrain variety is something to take away for when I make another sidescrolling platformer inspired game.Vanguard wrote:As far as the stages being memorable, I think the two biggest problems are that enemies feel largely interchangeable and the terrain is generally uninteresting. Most enemies are on screen for about a second before they die. I don't give a lot of thought to their individual bullet patterns either. I know they're all different, but none are individually threatening enough for me to care about prioritizing specific threats. The enemies who stand out the most to me are those guys with 2 HP and get mercy invincibility after taking a hit. Their unique damage mechanics and the way they curl up into a ball to jump around make them feel like they're something like mass-produced versions of the protagonist. The way they move around a lot, and how they attack from above, both with a speadshot and with their own bodies, make them demand a lot more attention than normal enemies. I especially like the bit in stage 5 where a pair drop down next to you and you effortlessly punt both of them off of your elevator. I'd say the second best are the shield guys who throw bombs. Usually they're not a problem, but when you meet them in the areas where you need to hold your ground, their area denial presents a unique threat.
It was originally like that but because of how the grenade explosion bullets tended to overlap it was hard to effectively plan your jump timing and some nasty situations were possible. Maybe greater randomization of the place where the grenades land is a better alternative? That way attention is still required but everything's shown in advance. I'll see what I can do with that attack.Vanguard wrote:Though I think it'd be better to remove the ones from that early form of the final boss where he fires bullets up into the air and the crosshairs show where they're going to land. That attack is really easy, if the player had to keep track of the shots themselves they'd at least need to use up more mental CPU cycles watching the ground and the air at the same time.
My problem with hitbox display is that once you enable it there's no reason to disable it. I like that element of approximating your dodges that comes with invisible hitboxes. And I played through the game with a hitbox that almost matched the sprite to make sure everything is very dodgeable visually. Maybe a good solution would be making the hitbox visible in the tutorial and adding some bullet dodging challenges into it.Vanguard wrote:Also, what do you think of a hitbox display option? I imagine it would smooth out the initial learning curve on dodging bullet hell attacks in a platformer.
There's no real reason, it's just to give the player a reason to let go of the shoot button, and it feels cool to suck in the energy. It doesn't auto-collect from certain flying enemies because they appear in auto-scrolling parts of the game. The intention is to make the energy pick ups like medals or coins in shmups so there's more little things to do and optimize besides survival.Vanguard wrote:What's the reasoning behind the way powerups auto-collect only when you stop shooting for a moment? And why don't the ones from flying enemies do it? It's not a big problem I just don't get why.
Is that why down+boost specifically doesn't crouch boost you in the early part of the animation, unlike any other input? I mean, you can already crouch boost through a lot of stuff simply by neutral boosting and tapping repeatedly with half-decent timing on enemy shots. If you don't want the player to be able to slide under any shots at all for speed purposes, you can simply remove the ducking animation from the early part of the boost and have the boost always be standing. With the improvements to boosting in the air allowing you more control, there will be more reason to jump boost past stuff instead of crouch boosting under shots anyways as you have more control over landing. It just feels really unintuitive when ducking to lose your ducking state if you boost, but you duck while boosting if you don't duck as you initiate the boost. I just want whether you're standing when boosting or ducking to be more consistent I guess.boghog wrote:Implemented almost everything now, with the exception of the crouch boost. I don't particularly like how it functions atm but it had to be done for balancing purposes, otherwise the player can simply crouch-boost their way through a lot of the game, going under enemies while being safe from their shots. It's one of those inconvenient compromises like the input for falling through platforms overlapping with shooting down.
You know, I was about to type out a whole thing about how the difference between crouch boost and spamming boost the latter having some frames where you're vulnerable which makes a difference but then I realized that it's also true for crouch boosting because of how boost recovery works now. So you win this one, I'll go fix it right now.BareKnuckleRoo wrote: Is that why down+boost specifically doesn't crouch boost you in the early part of the animation, unlike any other input? I mean, you can already crouch boost through a lot of stuff simply by neutral boosting and tapping repeatedly with half-decent timing on enemy shots. If you don't want the player to be able to slide under any shots at all for speed purposes, you can simply remove the ducking animation from the early part of the boost and have the boost always be standing. With the improvements to boosting in the air allowing you more control, there will be more reason to jump boost past stuff instead of crouch boosting under shots anyways as you have more control over landing. It just feels really unintuitive when ducking to lose your ducking state if you boost, but you duck while boosting if you don't duck as you initiate the boost. I just want whether you're standing when boosting or ducking to be more consistent I guess.
Personally I think making boosting always lower your hitbox wouldn't be bad either, and you just have to redesign the more basic enemies you want to fire a shot at low height designed to deny crouch boosts for enemies you don't want to be able to duck under. Like the basic soldiers, you can refine it and look at stuff like a wider "wave" style shot or double shot. Or if you don't want to spend forever rebalancing the game, something to look at in a sequel perhaps?
And neutral sliding or forward sliding is still better than holding down + tapping slide because if you're gonna be doing that you want to be firing forward as much as possible anyways rather than firing downwards, which you could already do.You know, I was about to type out a whole thing about how the difference between crouch boost and spamming boost the latter having some frames where you're vulnerable which makes a difference but then I realized that it's also true for crouch boosting because of how boost recovery works now. So you win this one, I'll go fix it right now.
<<<U p D A T e D>>>BareKnuckleRoo wrote: And neutral sliding or forward sliding is still better than holding down + tapping slide because if you're gonna be doing that you want to be firing forward as much as possible anyways rather than firing downwards, which you could already do.
The update feels almost perfect. It's vastly improved and feels super controllable. Bravo.
The only nitpicks I have left are Boost -> Jump without pressing a direction has a teeny tiny speed drop compared to Boost -> Jump while holding forward. It makes the difference between making the jump in the tutorial or not (but the distance difference is pretty small). It's not a huge issue; the main reason I'd like Jump to go full distance without having to hold forward to do it (and only slow down when pushing backward) is so a boost jump moves you just as far forward potentially as when firing up or down during the jump. But if the changes to the jump physics make this difficult to adjust, it's not the end of the world either.
The only other issue I noticed is it's possible to get stuck in the Tutorial and experience a softlock where you have no way to exit except quitting the game. To trigger it, jump across the boost jump in the tutorial, then with the screen scrolled ahead, drop down to the left into that pit. You can't move left to get back up where you did the boost jump from, and you're stuck until you quit the game. A potential fix is making the blocks at the bottom vanish after you boost jump across, or don't be an idiot and walk back left to fall in there after. ;w;
Ideally I'd want to port it but realistically definitely not any time soon, don't have the system and can't afford it either.guigui wrote:This game looks quite fun and polished. I would like to try it, and am sorry for being that guy : Switch version ?
Yeah, the special energy gain is increased by a lot on Mild so there was no need to give that initial boost to make sure the player can play around with the special attackBareKnuckleRoo wrote:Is it normal for the item that contains a ton of special weapon energy at the start of the game not be present in Mild difficulty? Running through Mild, just noticed that change.
Doesn't this encourage avoiding the item once you're powered up so you can extend your free time as much as possible? Since you never travel from right to left it might be best to add another rule saying that the counter only stops if the weapon item is to the right of the player. You'd want to leave it working the way it is now for the elevator though.boghog wrote:The weapon drops are what I preferred using or balanced the sections around, so they are recommended but not optimal. The score multiplier freezes while a weapon item is on screen, so switching weapons doesn't steal any precious puntos.
Technically yes, realistically though it's such a small bonus that it shouldn't prevent someone from changing to an appropriate weapon for any given section. So I don't mind it existing as a little trick for tiny optimizations, adds a nice extra use for weapon pick ups when you're full.Vanguard wrote: Doesn't this encourage avoiding the item once you're powered up so you can extend your free time as much as possible? Since you never travel from right to left it might be best to add another rule saying that the counter only stops if the weapon item is to the right of the player. You'd want to leave it working the way it is now for the elevator though.
).Good catch again, UPDATED! No clue how I let those slip especially the jump rebind not saving.BareKnuckleRoo wrote:Two more minor bugs:
• When playing keyboard, whenever you quit the game the game changes the saved key mapping for Jump back to the spacebar. You have to go in and remap Jump anytime you reload the game.
• Quitting to the main menu when the low time limit alarm is sounding will CONSTANTLY PLAY IT in the main menu (I was sitting around chatting on a run I'd botched and listening to the stage music which is why I let the timer drop that low
Good stuff dude, make sure to link it once you get a clean run. And excellent, I'll send you a PM once I've got a little demo/prototype ready.BareKnuckleRoo wrote:I'm still playing this, trying to show off a half decent run where I blaze through stage 1, even if I have to play the rest carefully. I'm not happy with my previous deathless recording since there's like 3 or 4 spots with dropped frames from the stream where the video pauses briefly.
I would certainly be open to playtesting other stuff you have in the future.
Congrats on the 1cc, glad you enjoyed it! The power down is a bit of a relic, it's to reward players who go for a 1cc with higher DPS and make credit feeding more challenging which should in theory leave even casual players somewhat satisfied. The reason it's a bit of a relic is that I implemented it long before I added the special weapon bar which more-or-less serves the same purpose. Is the power down a huge problem, or is it just that it resets to the default gun?kane wrote:Playing since yesterday and got my 1CC today. Fun and controls great (as long as I avoid boost jumps).
boghog, is there a particular reason why you designed the game with multiple levels of shot power? Does the (almost immediate) build up to max power serve any purpose, or did you just follow shmup tradition? Same with powering down after a miss. I find the former harmless but pointless, and the latter to hurt the experience, a lot.
