Minerva Project

[robocup30]

Hello, this is my first post here!
I'm here to present you guys, Minerva Project, a small shmup I made using GM:S inspired by Raiden Project, Touhou, and Jamestown.
This is my first time releasing a game I made for others to play as well as making something more complicated than a space invaders.



Download Link (20.4 mb)

What's in it:
3 Stages with boss
3 Different ships
3 Difficulties

The tilesets and roughly third of the sprites used are from Tyrian by Daniel Cook.

IMPORTANT NOTE:
Due to some bug with older GameMaker engine when running on newer windows 10, screen may go completely black when exiting the game. To prevent this from happening, press f4 twice to switch game from full screen to window and then to full screen again when you first start playing, or just play from windowed mode.

Thank you for checking it out!

[Ebbo]

This was a suprisingly solid effort, nice work so far! I would like to see you implementing some crucial features though, such as customizable control options and high score boards.

Some more specific gripes of mine: those rock formations in Stage 2 feel somewhat arbitrary challenge, especially when you fly under them and can't really see your ship - having atleast a visible hitbox during parts like that would help a lot. Also when you defeat the boss, you'll lose the ship's control very quickly, sometimes making it quite hard to grab the spoils the boss drops. Maybe this feature is there to encourage flying near the top of the screen (which makes all the items automatically fly towards you) but I found it bothersome nevertheless.

[n0rtygames]

The tilesets and roughly third of the sprites used are from Tyrian by Daniel Cook.

Awesome use of them too if I may say so! This is precisely the reason he made them royalty free - so programmers could rapidly prototype with non shitty art..

Looks great! Gonna try when I finish work!

[Ixmucane2]

Very good, but I'm not completely satisfied with coins, powerups and bombs.

Collecting coins by staying at the top of the screen is too dangerous (at least for a rather hard to memorize game with very fast enemies); collecting coins by standing still is infeasible (try a shorter timer, e.g. 1 second, and a large reward); collecting coins by running them over is frustrating between the coins are too many, too scattered and scrolling away too fast to catch them all (as a reference, Tyrian has fewer coins, slower scrolling, and higher value score items that can be prioritized over lesser coins).

Powerups are completely useless after getting 8, i.e. very soon: consider a combination of more weapon power levels and giving more bombs and less powerups, to reach the limit late in the level, or providing some benefit for excess powerups (replace them with bombs, or automatically trade in three or four collected ones for an extra life).

I'd expect bombs to be retained after dying, maybe losing only one; they are medium power and not obviously score-damaging, so you could treat them as a perfectly normal one-shot weapon that's meant to be used and make them more common and more necessary.

[Cagar]

Eh...

Collecting coins by staying at the top of the screen is too dangerous (at least for a rather hard to memorize game with very fast enemies); collecting coins by standing still is infeasible (try a shorter timer, e.g. 1 second, and a large reward); collecting coins by running them over is frustrating between the coins are too many, too scattered and scrolling away too fast to catch them all (as a reference, Tyrian has fewer coins, slower scrolling, and higher value score items that can be prioritized over lesser coins).

Staying at the top of the screen is not dangerous. You're supposed to kill enemies to fill the screen with coins, and then just dip yourself at top for coin-vaccuum. Also, why is that a problem that they're scrolling away so fast that you can't catch them all? The scoring would be lame shit if you're actually able to catch them all manually (If there was no touhou-vaccuuming)

Powerups are completely useless after getting 8, i.e. very soon: consider a combination of more weapon power levels and giving more bombs and less powerups, to reach the limit late in the level, or providing some benefit for excess powerups (replace them with bombs, or automatically trade in three or four collected ones for an extra life).

I'm not sure if this even happened, but how about increasing that score multiplier for each powerup collected with full power on? It would work

I'd expect bombs to be retained after dying, maybe losing only one; they are medium power and not obviously score-damaging, so you could treat them as a perfectly normal one-shot weapon that's meant to be used and make them more common and more necessary.

I'd say you should lose 50% of your bombs. With ship 3 the bomb is hilariously overpowered, you can launch it and rush on top of a boss and kill it completely with 2 quick bombs.


My suggestions:
-On death, don't completely reset coin value. just decrease it by 66% or something. Overly punishing scoring mechanics are so -00 .
-Nerf green ship's bomb
-Ships tend to get a bit TOO slow when using shift
-... completely delete those stage 2 rock formations
-Make sure that stage 1 boss rockets are not milkable


Completely opinion-matter: Decrease coin value by 33% for bombing, to prevent stupid and safe bomb-scoring




Eh...

[Pteriforever]

I had fun with it. I agree with Cagar on most of those points, though. ^.^

I must say, the difficulty was.... underwhelming. I think it's because you're given such an excess of bombs?

Scores:

2,217,700 -- Hard
2,969,400 -- Normal