Ebbo wrote:This game sure is hard. I'm really struggling with Standard - even the easiest difficulty setting isn't exactly walk in the park. Although my skills are pretty mediocre I'm partially going to blame somewhat poor visibility. Everything from bullets to enemies looks so small and featureless that it's way too easy to lose sight of your own ship. Especially the third player ship (Wanderer something) is ridiculously tiny. Bland backgrounds don't really help things either. I'm sure that with a bit of practice you could improve your art skills, although it's going to demand some determination.
I tried to balance difficulty with loads of resources, primarily. :V
Not sure how exactly to add feature and distinction to bullets, but enemies are mainly like that because, well, each one had some three minutes of work done. I could go through and redo a lot of the sprites, but it would take me a long time and it wouldn't be that much better anyway. I think I'll commission some graphics guy sometime soon for it.
Wanderer 6D-4 is called "6D-4" because it's phonetically close to "sixty four" and because the ship graphic (sans outline) contains 64 pixels.
Backgrounds were also something I added with a little effort. I don't like to strain a lot of graphical things
![Sad :(](./images/smilies/icon_sad.gif)
I might ask someone sometime to redo a lot, again.
The level design is just kinda there, lacking cohesiveness: nothing really caught my interest or made me think about possible scoring routes. Scoring seems pretty convoluted as you said and while there are plenty of shooters with complex scoring systems, I'd have personally preferred something more simple and intuitive. Maybe it's because I found the presentation sloppy which makes it hard to tell when I'm actually doing well scoring-wise.
Anyway that's my two cents, hopefully you'll find some of it helpful and good luck with the project.
Did you end up using the Overdrive Mode?
The enemies' inflated amounts stack up in the text indicators and you gain Ranking much faster.
I was considering changing the point item graphic during it, just to reinforce it, though. Yea or nay?
I guess in terms of simplicity scoring could be boiled down to
1: Collect charge, hit maximum
2: Collect point items with maximum charge
3: When a lot of enemies are about to appear, use Overdrive
4: Don't die during Overdrive
5: Graze a bunch so the point items collected would be worth more
You can get some 150,000,000 in Stage 5 as a result, as opposed to some 50,000,000 without using Overdrive.
BPzeBanshee wrote:TLDR version: get rid of precise collision checking and use boxes smaller than sprite size for everything + what Ebbo said + use an external dll for ini writing/reading cause GM sucks.
Detailed version:
Now that I've had a go at the game I can definitely see some of the issues regarding it being 'too hard' at times. Here's a few suggestions:
- The boss fights felt too long, not so much because of the actual duration, but because you've got a bonus-points-for-quick-kill timer showing up on the screen which does not fit with the duration you have to put up with the patterns. Maybe consider either boosting the attack of the player for the boss specifically or reduce the health it has in its phases.
Which... ones? All of them?
Boss fight time for each stage goes about 1:00, 2:20, 2:50, 2:40, 2:40, 7:00, with 4, 6, 7, 7, 7, and 12 patterns to use respectively. (Using 6D-4 A shottype)
- I didn't quite realise until after playing the game several times that you had SHIFT assigned to the focus key. I think you could probably kill two birds with one stone in regards to accessibility to newbies and the 'oh i didnt know you could pick your ship' syndrome by adding large arrow key graphics under the descriptions for the ship in that menu while showing a really basic outline of the controls.
I can totally do that.
- I realise this is probably out of the question, but I think one of the big banes of shmups is when they go with using mindfuck bullet patterns at the expense of difficulty. If you can, nerf some of those particular bullet patterns.
You mean those zigzag bullets like everyone else, right?
Yeah, a lot of those are being changed.
- I couldn't see how Stage 6 was doable with these huge bullets around the place and no gaps between them. In Cave games there's also a lot of bullets around the place but the hitboxes of the bullets are smaller to compensate. Yours are using precise collision checking, which is not only a bad idea for performance but makes for impossible patterns when said bullets are overlaying eachother in rings.
Firstly, there is absolutely no "precise collision checking" anywhere, and the bullets all have smaller square hitboxes somewhere in the middle of them.
I had recently modified those bullets' hitboxes because when creating them, I forgot to change the hitbox from what they were copied from. As a result, they had the same hitbox as those zigzag / leaf / rain bullets.
They're being made slightly smaller.
In addition, I had a few ideas regarding your technical matters too:
- The major lag at the end of the highscore screen had me convinced the program had stopped working, and Task Manager saying it's Not Responding doesn't help. This lag comes from two factors - the usage of Game Maker's INI file handling which is very slow for the amount of stuff you're writing/reading from file, and the ultracrypt.dll that you're using. There are external DLLs available for INI file parsing that are much faster, so consider using one to cure the lag issue there. Alternatively, you could just use the file_text_*** stuff instead but you'd have to redesign the system away from being like how it is with INI-based stuff so that might not be ideal.
- You're not wrong about the music being terrible, but I attribute this more so to them being MIDI files using Windows' terrible MIDI library more than just bad composition. Maybe consider using an external sound engine to run them as XM modules or something similar where you have more control over your instrument choice.
- Since you're using MIDIs, I believe it is possible to actually pause the music upon pressing of ESC with sound_background_tempo(). That should solve the problem of pausing 'ruining the timing of the music' and all that.
Hope this helps.
![Very Happy :D](./images/smilies/icon_biggrin.gif)
I actually have an INI handling DLL, but I haven't used it for this project, seeing as my other project literally has over 150x the amount of data to save.
I'll implement it for the newer version.
Ow, thanks, "music is terrible," "just bad composition"
![Very Happy :D](./images/smilies/icon_biggrin.gif)
I'm still learning, you know?
I'm actually producing MP3s for the sequel, but the first game is having MIDIs mainly because the game wasn't made entirely flexible enough to allow for it.
Also so the game wouldn't be 100 MB and no one would play it because I didn't have anything beforehand released to prove that I can produce things of... "
quality."
Have you seen the Music Room? There are 25 songs to convert and at about an hour combined, that's like 70 megabytes on top of a 10 MB game. :V
The sequel will have a lot more graphics and sounds though, it having more stages, but that just means I won't release it until 2016 D:
Oh, and thank you for the advice on the sound tempo thing. I didn't realize that I could pause it that way
Still, thank you for the advice and comments, though!
I ended up losing my flash drive, so all my difficulty editing for the past week went out the window, meaning the wait is just that much longer now >_>