Re: Lunacy Star Second

[Taizen Chisou]

Re: Lunacy Star Second

Download Page

Gameplay video (10 Sept. 2016)
Advanced Difficulty video

"Re: Lunacy Star Second" by Lunacy Indeterminate
2017 for Steam Greenlight

The fate of the universe is thrust into jeopardy once again as a mysterious being threatens to resurrect the ethereal embodiment of all that is Chaos: the Lunacy Star.
Fight through five grueling stages of pure bullet-hell action and reclaim the security of our future- if you can.






[Taizen's Twitter] | [Re:LSS on SoundCloud] | [Lunacy Indeterminate on Tumblr]

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Hello again, everyone. Long time, no see. Following in the footsteps of the first Re: Lunacy Star, we have a brand-spankin'-new fresh paint of coat to slather on LS' rather maligned sequel title, Lunacy Star Second. Featuring an incredibly robust bullet assembly supporting many more bullets than ever before in a Game Maker game, things are about to get quite lunatic.
I am so, incredibly excited to share Re:LSS with you. Later in the week [hopefully!], a beta build of the game will be posted here to play, featuring stages 1 through 3 of the game. In the meantime, I do implore you to check out the video, my soundtrack, and if I may be so bold, get hype.

[BPzeBanshee]

Hello and welcome back!

I was more keen for this than I was the original game so I'm looking forward to seeing how this one's changed.

[Taizen Chisou]

Thank you, BP! It's good to see a familiar face.

In other news: ReLSS v0.1 is now available for download!

[Taizen Chisou]

Re:LSS's soundtrack is now available for download from Bandcamp!
Please let me know any thoughts that you have about the music.
Regular Progress is resuming shortly.

[BPzeBanshee]

I feel conflicted about this one.

Disclaimer: I don't want to dissuade anyone else from trying this out because it blows the first Lunacy Star right out of the water for me and anyone who's into these sort of bullet hells should definitely give it a go! But I feel like the original incarnation of this had better music, like it's missing the "raw" touch that LSS's previous music had.

I'm also wondering why you went to such trouble to bring this game to the GM:Studio era and still kept the game at 50 FPS. Was this a "Let's be like (random dodgy PAL game)" thing or a "My laptop's rubbish so I'll run it at European NES speed so I don't have to optimise" kind of thing? The latter seems strange considering the trouble you went to with the portrait vs widescreen and graphics slider options so I'm thinking it might be the former?

[Taizen Chisou]

I feel there was a strange sort of charm to vanilla LSS's music, yes. That was about the point I started really figuring out how to use FL Studio for myself without the abject basic-ness that was the very first vanilla LS's soundtrack.

About the frames:
Aaahahha, uhhh.
The 50FPS thing is just a remnant of Re:LS's desperation to save frames.
The optimizations present in this one's engine largely (with minimal exception) negate the need for it, but I didn't learn of that fact until after I'd written half the scripts.
In fact, there's only one pattern in the game that lags consistently on my low-end laptop and it's the one that tosses out 1,400 bullets that all curve.

In any case, thanks for checking stuff out! Got any thoughts to spare me on the pattern/shots/etc?

[BPzeBanshee]

The only real thing that came to mind on the patterns was the one with the bullets that appear from the bottom-left corner along with the Star of Davids, and the color scheme. Having things appear behind you is generally a big no-no unless you can properly establish that bullets will appear from behind and even then it's frowned upon for the simple reason that you can't kill what's behind you and it leads to unfair practices.

Unrelated but I had to turn the sfx volume down a bit as well since some of the sfx balancing was off.

Really digging the portrait/widescreen switch too, I contemplated messing with that with GMOSSE and decided it wasn't worth the trouble. Did you hijack the application surface to do that or did you go the simple route of having a big room with border objects and cropping it with a view when set to portrait mode?

[Taizen Chisou]

The game contains a script to resize the window, viewport, and relevant surfaces when the player changes the involved settings, and place the game frame's anchor at an offset. The offset is 180 in frameless mode (3:4), 320 in 4:3, and 427 in 16:9, you see.
I had to disable the rotation setting at the last second because some changes made to the configurations menu broke it (as well as window scaling which i found out later! i'm so upset)

I'm definitely modifying that pattern in Stage 2. I've always been sort of on the fence about that one because it's slightly, slightly biased in favor of the homing shot player. By which I mean "very." The laser type is just about completely fucked there lmao

Unrelated but I had to turn the sfx volume down a bit as well since some of the sfx balancing was off.

Heck
I'll do a pass on the bank of SFX later also. There's like 60 of them at this point and it's honestly been slightly low on my priority list

Speaking of: development updates Quite Soon. I've taken about 3 weeks off now and am getting restless
For the main campaign, I only have stage 4 and half of stage 5 left to write. Nobody's tried out/told me about the WIP build of my final boss yet ; w;

[Taizen Chisou]

Version 0.13 is ready for download.
Now with bullet pattern balance changes, updates to the functionality of a choice few shottypes, and functional gamepad support.
[Comprehensive patch notes here]

[Despatche]

Oh no, all of Taizen Chisou's dropbox uploads are gone, and they're gone too. Please come back!