shmups.system11.org

Hi everyone,
Im developing a shoot them up on Game Maker, taking place in a stupid universe I've creating with some friends.
It's called TEBU SHOOTER.
Basically it's kind of a manic, I'm trying to create a fun gameplay but I need feedback from real shmup players.

At the moment there is only one playable level (which is supposed to be the second level of the game).
You can choose between 4 characters, 5 in the final version but the last one is not finished.
Your character has 2 different weapons with their own powerups, and a specific shield. When you destroy the powerup enemy, the color of the item is cycling. Your bomb is depending what weapon you are using.





So the keys are :

Arrows - Move (o rly)
Ctrl - Shoot
Space - Change weapon
Shift - Shield that deflects bullets, use for scoring
W - Bomb

I would love to have some feedback on the game, difficulty and stuff.

DEMO A5

Ninja Edit : the online score dll was missing

Tried it.

It is fun. I suppose stage is not fully ready yet. Pacing is kinda nice, but some enemies tend to linger on screen bit too long.
Also, you might want to add some sort of limit to how often grazing-sound is played. For example, if you go over firing enemy during invulnerability, the sound becomes bit unbearable.
Now regarding scoring a bit; I see that you added some sort score-penalty upon dying. Taking away score if you die is no-no in my books. Reducing multiplier and shit is fine, but no touching the score.

Uh, ctrl-space-shift-w control scheme is clunky.
I would suggest Z(tapping for weapon 1, holding for weapon 2)+ X (shield)+ C (Bomb). Or making them configurable.

Thanks for your feedback !
For the keys, I'll do it custom configurable when I'll start doing the option screen. At this moment you probably find the W key strange because it's away from the others. That's because me and the usual guys who test for me are frenches (swap Z and W on your keyboard and you see the layout I did)

I'll do this for the grazing sound because you're right. It's annoying as hell.
For the score I had an idea of reproducing the alternative you have on arcade. Either you are casual player or playing on emulator, and you can put infinite credits to finish the game if you just want to see it, or you are hardcore and play for 1cc or scoring.
I wanted to put like 2 modes, an "Explorer" one where you can't game over but your score is divided by 2 each time your die, and a "Warrior" one with limited lives that you gain as you score, and no penalty.

But, it could be better if I find how to merge the 2 modes.

I would suggest continues. Score resets etc, maybe no access to bonus zones or something. And to improve player performance, give player a rank between stages. Automatically F if player continued for example. It should make player try to improve.

The game is funny, and graphics are very good.

The controls are strange, and using brazilian keyboards, the use of SHIFT KEY repeated times causes a program crash.

Better use Z,X,C,V, as suggested.

Demo link is broken.

Character name = Ninjaman
Me = sold

The brazilian keyboard has more keys and function than others, because portuguese language needs to use more signs, called accents. So, our keyboards have between 110 and 120 keys. and this configuration obey a government rule called ABNT2. This way, to press "shift" repeated times causes a system crash and reboot machine, or activate other system measures.

This is the reason because brazilian developers use the keys Z and X.

Looks pretty good so far.

Will the game run in tate? I'd love to have this game running in my cabinet.....

If possible, don't use 'z'. In germany, the 'z' key is where the american 'y' key is.

REALLY? The keys positions are different in Germany? You dont use the "qwerty" scheme?

They also speak a different language! CRAZY

Hey guys,
I have no idea how my topic has been staying in the first pages despite the fact that I didn't news anything about the game since one year. Haha
I've improved some things, for example the powerup system had a very random dps output variation with levels, some weapons were becoming even less powerful when fully upgraded (6) than with nothing. This is now balanced for every character.
I've also remade some weapons to make them prettier/more interesting (some weapons were just shooting everywhere on the screen with high damage or were too hard to aim for the damage reward)
I've made a video of the gameplay for El cuisinor, whose weapons are the big fat laser a la Dodonpachi (bomb : fullscreen dmg + invincibility, classical shit), and a charged shot (bomb : very short invincibility at startup, and then you can shoot while charging for 30s)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lF7mMxbv ... re=mh_lolz

I'm probably gonna release very soon a new demo, maybe today.

EDIT : Here it is http://www.mediafire.com/?e3w31e22lb1c6n3
For the moment you cannot map other keys to play (it's going to change, the control option is almost finished)
W - use your current weapon
X - shield
C - swap between red or blue weapon
V - bomb

In the menus you have to use Enter as a start button, if you wanna play with your gamepad use xpadder (coming with the game)

Had a go at this a while ago. It was pretty neat looking although there seemed to be a bit too much happening for the first stage.

You still working on this more or less, Shaman?

Hi,
Yes I'm working a lot on the project at this moment. I've finished the last character Motoman, his red bomb was a bit hard to program but now that's over. I have to finish the level 2 (the level available for testplay is the second, I have to rework the first one's graphics to match the new pixel art, that's why it is kind of fast paced), kick the awful clown boss from the game and put a real one, and work on a 2 player (local) mode.
I also have to remove every random number generation except the purely cosmetic ones because I'm aiming an online 2 player mode in a far future.
Then I'll continue the stages.
Some new graphics to finish :


The last one is the real level 2 boss

See ya guys !

wow. thats quite the boss. how'd you make those graphics?

For some reason when I first saw this I read "Momotan" and was expecting a loli character.

But that black hole bomb looks pretty amazing too

Yeah, the graphics are looking quite impressive!

One question: how are you doing the DDP-style laser? There's been quite some discussion and lessons learnt (or lessons *I* learnt anyway) about the different methods and it's interesting to see how others have done it. Is it the entire sprite being seen there or multiple objects with synced image frames?

Hi,
The DDP laser is made this way :

First of all i have a sprite that is the whole screen long vertically (320 for me), its animation is the sprite moving vertically 20 pixels up each frame and looping into himself (that's very simple to do with character maker 99) so the sprite is composed of 16 frames.

Then i've programmed a surface for the drawing, surfaces can allow you to cut a sprite in the middle of it when you draw. That surface is starting just in front of the ship and ends at the first collision point, when you start shooting the surface has a progressive increase from the ship to the collision point (to fake the laser coming out from you).
That surface is drawing the sprite, so there you have the basic (and that was the hardest to find) part of the programmation.

For the damage, it's invisible objects that are spawned in front of the ship and going to 90° with speed 12, and they are locked to stay at the same X as the ship, on each step there's a x = ship.x command. The first of these objects goes at the same speed the laser is shot to avoid an enemy being it before the laser is touching him. On collision with an ennemy, these objects spawn another "flame impact" object on it that is not moving and lasting long (like 6 ou 8 frames only), there's a lot of these.

For the cosmetic part, there is a "head" sprite that you can only see if the laser is not yet touching things, when it's coming out, 2 sprites being drawn on your ship for the shockwave and shot effect

For the pixel art it's just really long and I'm doing sprites since a moment, I was doing another game (RPG, never finished)

Hi,
New release A4 !

http://www.mediafire.com/?j36s9g9pgxzt8la

Changelog
- Motoman is playable !
Red shot has low accuracy but is very powerful, leaves smalle black holes that can damage multiple enemies on bullet impacts. The black hole bomb sucks all the projectiles in for some seconds and then unleashes them.
Blue shot has a good accuracy, the sword plasma can become really powerful. The sword bomb converts the projectiles it touches into bonuses and damages the whole screen

- El cuisinor has been buffed
Red shot does about 30% more damage
Blue shot (charge) has the charge time cut in half, the bomb now converts every bullet on screen into bonuses when you throw it, then you can shoot while charging for about 2 min, and your charged shots now erase enemy projectiles. Also the input is more lenient if you wanna play the charged shot without charging (you have to press constantly on the fire button, but you have a larger frame window to do so and the inputs are more spaced). That bomb is best used when your shot power is maxed
The shield lasts longer and the bullet attractor effect has been improved

- Blue El profesor bomb has been buffed
Before, it was creating more modules in front of the ship, you were invincible for the whole duration of the powerup, and each projectile that the modules touched were converted into a friendly bullet
Now, you are only invincible for 0.5s and the screen is cleaned when you use the bomb, then more modules appear in front of the ship. They will block the bullets that go too near to you but you still can die ! The firepower is twice as powerful during the bomb powerup effect. That bomb is best used when your shot power is maxed

- The high score screen has been redone !

Now shows which character has been used for the high scores.

NACHOS!

I'm confused, is this some kind of score attack mode? Sometimes the score resets to zero when you die, and sometimes it does not.

It subtracts a specific amount of score for each death I'm pretty sure.

Ok I think I've got it now. I'm impressed with all the stuff going on, but is pretty frustrating though, as the minus scoring promotes constant restarting.

Is it possible to make your shmup playable in proper tate? The reason I'm asking is that I'm laying Tebu Shooter on an arcade monitor setup and think that'd be ace if presented in tate format.

Is the resolution at 320 x 240 or is it a bit higher than that?

Keep up the awesome work on it, Shaman.

PC Engine Fan X! ^_~

It's way higher than 240x320 - I was running a res of 1024x768 and had to bump up my rest to 1280x1024 because it was that large. Should be possible to do TATE depending on how Shaman has his room code set up but probably not at a res suitable for your monitor like what Rozyrg's games and GMOSSE (albeit untested on an arcade cabinet but should) work.

If your monitor can run a higher res however and the only issue becomes the actual rotation, check your graphics settings. Sometimes CTRL-ALT-RIGHTARROWKEY will actually rotate the entire OS for you on its side which will increase performance requirements somewhat but should do the same job.

Hi guys,
The original resolution is 240x320 but I'm scaling it up to have some better effects still along with the big pixels (everything that is rotated like the bullets is cleaner than with a real scaled 240x320) At this moment the room is 480x640 large and scaled to full screen while keeping aspect ratio
But I can do some things for you, like coding the screen turning or whatever. This is just settings, it is probably not complicated.
EDIT : after a 10 min test, that's very simple, so next release you'll have to press a key and you'll switch between horizontal and vertical display.

Also new A5 release !
http://www.mediafire.com/?qyvjxabaiok73jz

Changelog :
-The real boss has arrived, you have to destroy the right, left and down parts before you can attack the core which is gonna shoot fat rays
-You can press F11 to switch between fullscreen and windowed mode (temporary, I'll do a real clean option screen soon)
-Basic enemy bullets have been reverted to an older version, they are a bit bigger and less "blurry"


Gonna do the real level complete/score calculation screen now, then a 2P mode (that is gonna be the hardest part as everything has been programmed for an unique ship)

Some recommendations:

- if you're going to make an options menu allow for how much you're upscaling, so folks like PC Engine Fan X can actually run it in 240x320. Don't go with forcing resolutions though as that is known for causing some messups of desktops.

- F11 for fullscreen....I think that may be the convention with some browsers for HTML5 games but with GM it's usually F4.

- with your rotation, are you going to do it with the view? You probably know this already but setting the views to rotated before you actually go into them is the ideal way to avoid distortion issues (I found this out a bit late myself).

- your included version of Xpadder doesn't support Windows 7 apparently, or at least that's the error I got. Probably not anything you can really do since the newer versions of Xpadder are actually commercial so including them would technically be piracy, but frankly I don't see the need to include it in your package anyway (I suspect it may not be allowed by whatever license the original program came with anyway, some are damn evil for being 'free').

This is jumping a bit out of my league as I don't know exactly how you've made the hitbox design, but it could be possible to make an easy 2P mode by making the enemies aim towards whatever the nearest hitbox is - but that'll only work if your hitbox object is an actual object that isn't player-specific. The HUDs and score however would prove not as simple.......hmm. Let us know how you did it if you pull it off, I'm always interested to hear the nitty gritty side especially with GM.

Quick answer just for xpadder (I have to go to work, it's 9 am here)
You just have to run it in Windows XP SP3 compatibility for it to work under 7, causes no bug or nothing.
Nice advices for the rest, I'll take the resolution problem in account.

Incredible graphics, man! Nice game!

If I can help, I have the earlier versions of XPADDER and JOY2KEY, take them and have fun! They run on XP, 7(32bits) and 7(64bits). I tested before upload


XPADDER version 4.5.7.0.0 - 12/november/2012
http://www.mediafire.com/download/1kslct0d8mfk2w0/xpadder_gamepad_profiler.rar

JOY2KEY version beta 16/june/2006
http://www.mediafire.com/download/qurb6b88ifbeges/joykey_beta_2_20060616.zip


Read me from JOY2KEY: