Vulture Strike, develpment and updates

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Cristian_CL
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Vulture Strike, develpment and updates

Post by Cristian_CL »

Hello.
We have been developing a horizontal shoot 'em up with time travel mechanics for some time now, it is called Vulture Strike.
http://store.steampowered.com/app/63559 ... re_Strike/
You traverse through 2 parallel timelines and can switch from one to the other with a button, a bit similar to how you switch polarities in Ikaruga.
We recently released a new version of the demo (v.0.92) that is available for Windows, macOS and Linux through Steam.

Some of the main characteristics of the game:
- Strictly horizontal 2.5D: there are no perspective changes, it is always from left to right.
- No player health bar, 1 hit KO.
- Precise controls, no inertia when moving the ship.
- Uses 2 buttons: fire and Wormhole. Depending on the "Vision mode" you choose, you might use a third button to expand the Vision if you chose "Normal vision mode", this third button doesn't do anything if you chose "Vision always expanded".
- 3 difficulty settings.
- Completely configurable controls, works with keyboard, gamepad, arcade sticks, both analog or digital directions can be selected for movement. Mouse controls are not supported.
- 4 language settings for all in-game texts: English, Japanese, Simplified Chinese and Spanish.
- Risk-reward based scoring system.
- Standard shot and 2 powered up shot modes that are activated when the Frenzy gauge is filled.
- Online leaderboards (not in the demo).
- 5 levels (only 2 in the demo).
- Graphic configuration options.
- 16/9 fixed ratio.
- Events in game tied to frames. If your computer struggles when rendering the game and the framerate drops, the game will be slowed down, no frames will be skipped.
- Visions color can be changed by the player to make them more or less visible and more pleasing to the eye.
- Unlimited use of the Wormhole mechanic, which allows for infinite different ways to approach the levels and seemingly unlimited potential to optimize runs for high scores.

Some screenshots:
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Detailed manual, here you can read about the scoring system in detail:
http://vulturestrike.com/manual/

I will use this thread to post minor updates and go into more detail about certain aspects of the game.
Greetings.
Last edited by Cristian_CL on Mon Dec 11, 2017 8:13 am, edited 11 times in total.
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Cristian_CL
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Re: Vulture Strike

Post by Cristian_CL »

About player hit-box visibility and player shot origin:

One thing we recently updated is the player hit-box graphic, we made it uglier but more visible under certain circumstances:
Spoiler
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It obviously looks uglier now, but changes needed to be made, now the borders are darker so it generates greater contrast when Frenzy and Apocalypse modes are activated. As seen in the "Before" screenshot, we had made the mistake of having colors that were similar to the colors of Frenzy/ Apocalypse visual effects, which made the hit-box very hard to see. This was never a problem before we implemented the visual effects for Frenzy/ Apocalypse and it was an oversight on our part to not make this change immediately after the implementation of said visual effects. For now, we have decided to not add a muzzle visual effect for the standard shot to keep the hit-box perfectly visible. It is something we will keep tweaking though.
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All of that would have not been a problem at all if we made the player bullets/ lasers come from a different place, the actual cannon barrel for example, but there are several reasons why we decided to make player bullets and lasers come straight from the hit-box:
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Games of this kind demand the player to pay attention to different places of the screen and to follow different events with the eyes, which usually forces them to rapidly switch their attention from one point of the screen to another. This is specially true in faster-paced games where you often concentrate on a certain event while paying attention to secondary events with your peripheral vision [games in which you move your ship and your aiming reticle independently are even more demanding in this regard, such as Sin & Punishment]. In order to make the experience more pleasing and less stressful, some games offer a little help to allow the player to know where certain events are taking place without needing to actually switch their attention from where they are already looking. A good example is Strania. In that game, 2 long yellow lines (1 vertical, 1 horizontal) meet exactly at the center of the player hit-box, which allows the user to quickly confirm the exact position of their ship without actually needing to directly look at it.
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In our case, we didn't want to to that far, but we made the standard shot very fast, both in its speed to travel across the screen and its frequency, and we made it come straight out of the hit-box; by doing all that, we help the player confirm the vertical position of the hit-box (the part of the ship that actually matters) just by looking at the place they are shooting at.
At some point during development, we tried to make things that seemed to "make more sense", like having the shot come from another place instead of the hitbox; then we ran into different issues even if it looked better. For example, by leaving a gap between the player hit-box and the point of origin of your own bullets, there was a chance for very small enemy ship colliders to be placed right there in that gap, which might have resulted in very annoying situations in which you are completely cornered by an enemy ship but can't destroy it. This was a very rare and specific situation, but during exhaustive testing we actually ran into said situation in which some enemies, when positioned and rotated in very specific ways, had some part of their colliders placed right between the player hit-box and the place of origin of the player bullets.
At the end, it was the best decision to have player bullets come from the hit-box even if some players have questioned this and said it looks weird. Function over form.
Last edited by Cristian_CL on Thu Jun 15, 2017 3:37 am, edited 5 times in total.
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Cristian_CL
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Re: Vulture Strike, develpment and updates

Post by Cristian_CL »

Today we released an updated version of our demo (v.0.91).
http://vulturestrike.com/downloads/

Upgrades include:

1 - Player hit-box has been made more visible, as described in detail in my earlier post.
2 - Damage feedback has been improved: we added a more visible visual effect when you damage enemies. This is an aspect that was criticized by players who tried v.0.9 and it has been noticeably improved. Also, explosions in general have been made more flashy, which changes a bit the "feel" of the game.
Spoiler
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3 - The destroyed version of the environment from the first level has been re-worked to appear more devastated than before; however, lighting has been tweaked in both scenes to minimize the contrast between them. This was done because, when practicing level 1 for high scores and opening many consecutive Wormholes, the rapid change in the lighting and overall brightness of the screen was exhausting for the eyes, which might cause stress on the players. So, the scenes themselves are much more different from each other now in terms of detail and geometry but the colors/ lighting were tweaked to generate less contrast. Function over form, again.
Spoiler
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4 - Player ship has been made very slightly smaller. It is now a tiny bit easier to dodge bullet clusters.
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ciox
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Re: Vulture Strike, develpment and updates

Post by ciox »

Good job on addressing all the player feedback, among other things I think the dimension switching looks a lot more professional now.
For the player shot origin, there is one more thing you can do, which is to leave the beam firing from the front of the ship instead of the center and add extra shot collision independent of the main beam just for taking care of enemies trying to sneak in, this extra collision can be either invisible or like in the Dodonpachi series there can be a laser aura effect around the ship in addition to the laser, which is still away from the hitbox.
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Cristian_CL
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Re: Vulture Strike, develpment and updates

Post by Cristian_CL »

ciox wrote:Good job on addressing all the player feedback, among other things I think the dimension switching looks a lot more professional now.
For the player shot origin, there is one more thing you can do, which is to leave the beam firing from the front of the ship instead of the center and add extra shot collision independent of the main beam just for taking care of enemies trying to sneak in, this extra collision can be either invisible or like in the Dodonpachi series there can be a laser aura effect around the ship in addition to the laser, which is still away from the hitbox.
Thank you ciox for taking the time to check out the game again and provide feedback.
Yeah, that would definitely work. We would have to be very careful about this extra effect that is not the laser and make it very clear that it also damages enemies; otherwise it could create confusion when enemies "touch" the player ship but die before killing the player "for no apparent reason".
We will keep tweaking and trying different things.
Thank you again and have a good day.

Edit: Vulture Strike has just been Greenlit.
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SergioAlonso
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Re: Vulture Strike, develpment and updates

Post by SergioAlonso »

Hi Cristian!

Just played your game while recording the screen and commenting my feelings. Check out clicking the image below

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Cristian_CL
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Re: Vulture Strike, develpment and updates

Post by Cristian_CL »

Hey Sergio, that's awesome, thank you very much, it is extremely useful for us to see your gameplay.
It's a pity that you got less than ideal framerates, it is very likely because you were recording.
It seems that some things about the game are still somewhat confusing when you play for the first time! We will try to make the menus more intuitive, and by the way, the Xbox controller works fine, it can be set up in the settings, it's just that the keyboard is selected by default.

Thank you very much again Sergio.
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SergioAlonso
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Re: Vulture Strike, develpment and updates

Post by SergioAlonso »

Cristian_CL wrote:the Xbox controller works fine, it can be set up in the settings, it's just that the keyboard is selected by default.

Thank you very much again Sergio.
In most games that support keyboard game controllers, players don't have to make special configurations for popular controllers like xbox controller, and there is always a default usable configuration for generic controllers.
That's a standard you should meet.

On the recording the screen seems small, but when I was playing, it was full screen covering all the screen. There might be some conflict that is causing that, and that will affect whenever real youtubers (unlike me) will play your game and publish gameplay videos;
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Cristian_CL
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Re: Vulture Strike, develpment and updates

Post by Cristian_CL »

Thank you very much for your feedback.
Maybe we should make that keyboard and gamepad can work at the same time like in many shmup PC ports, instead of having to choose one or the other in the settings. That could be troublesome however if we decide to implement local multiplayer in the future. :roll:
The screen size issue might be that the screen capture software was set to capture at 1080p resolution but the game was being rendered at 720p.

Greetings and thank you for taking the time again!
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SergioAlonso
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Re: Vulture Strike, develpment and updates

Post by SergioAlonso »

Cristian_CL wrote:It's a pity that you got less than ideal framerates, it is very likely because you were recording.
You can make the game framerate indepedent. If it's running at 60fps, or 30 fps, or 15 fps, the speed that the bullets travel should not slow down. It's a technical aspect that in Unity is fixed using Physics2D or Time.deltaTime to move objects.
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Cristian_CL
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Re: Vulture Strike, develpment and updates

Post by Cristian_CL »

Good morning.

Today we launched the Steam page for the game:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/63559 ... re_Strike/

There you can download the newest version of the demo (0.92). For now it is only available through Steam; it is much more convenient now cause we can release further updates there without requiring the players to download the entire thing again.

There are several improvements from the last version:
- Most enemies now have muzzle flash effects when they shoot. This was needed to help players re-direct their sight to where bullets are coming from. The effect is just flashy enough to help players see which enemies are shooting and in which direction; hopefully not so much that it becomes distracting.
- Different spark effects have had their colors changed to make them more differentiable: player bullets, which are blue, now generate blue sparks and flashes when they hit enemies; however, sparks coming from exploding enemies are still orange, and muzzle effects from enemies are orange/ white-ish. Player bullets on-hit sparks had to be made blue to clearly differentiate them from enemy bullets or muzzle effects; before this change, these effects sometimes looked like enemy fire on peripheral vision because they were of similar colors to enemy fire.
- Many balance tweaks to the levels themselves, trying to reduce dead air to the minimum; also, level 1 on very hard has been made harder than before, it was too extremely easy compared to what comes next in the very hard difficulty.
- Slightly improved lighting and environments: now the destroyed version of stage 3 looks more devastated than before and more different from the not-destroyed version (similar to the change made before on stage 1).
- Added an option in the graphic settings to enable real-time shadows for the environments; still constant 60FPS at 1080 with all settings maxed on the recommended hardware.

Those are the main improvements on the new demo.
As for the full game, we just implemented online leaderboards and are working fine so far, but we are still discussing the rules to upload scores: should we reset player scores to 0 after they hit Retry (equivalent of using a credit) or just let them keep the score but disable their option to upload the score?

We also released a new trailer in which some of the changes mentioned can be seen:
https://youtu.be/kjFe1IRAews

Greetings, have a nice day and good luck everyone in your developments!

Edit: almost forgot! If any experienced shmup player reading this is interested in being a tester for the full version of the game, please contact me, you will be modestly compensated through paypal just like all the earlier testers. Just need to have a PC which at least meets the minimum hardware requirements and describe your experience in the genre (which games 1CC, etc.) in a mail or private message. E-mail:
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Fat Pug Studio
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Re: Vulture Strike, develpment and updates

Post by Fat Pug Studio »

Great log, i really enjoyed reading it. I actually figured out how lazy i am to log all the changes. I had the graphics guy change some enemy bullet colors and muzzle flashes/reflections yesterday but i didn't really think that would be interesting to anyone. It is to me and other devs of course, but i don't know how much the average Joe cares about that stuff.

I'll check out the demo and give you my two cents, i'm sure it will be useful!
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Cristian_CL
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Re: Vulture Strike, develpment and updates

Post by Cristian_CL »

Thank you, looking forward to your feedback!
To be honest I don't think much of the stuff I have written here is interesting at all to the average player, but this is the development forum after all :lol: :lol:
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Re: Vulture Strike, develpment and updates

Post by Fat Pug Studio »

Hi, i played the demo yesterday, here are my thoughts.

I see the game is made in Ikaruga style, 3d scrolling background (which is nicely polished) and 3d enemies which also look cool. The things i don't like in that type of games (which is purely subjective since that style has its audience) is the following:

- Small number of different enemies
- Small number of different types of bullets
- No screen shake on explosions, generally lack of oomph on destroying the enemies
- Except the energy bar, boss shows nothing that it is hit

As i said, those are purely subjective and they don't really matter since they are all a characteristic of that shmup subtype.

What i like:

- Wormhole mechanic is great, unique and interesting, i was really having fun with it. I guess you had a lot of work with it since you actually need to make two levels for one
- Gameplay is challenging in just the right amount and way
- Great bullet patterns

TLDR

Not really my cup of tea, but great in its own subgenre!
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Cristian_CL
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Re: Vulture Strike, develpment and updates

Post by Cristian_CL »

I thank you sincerely for this thoughtful feedback and for taking the time to check the demo!

I think we have to improve the damage feedback still, specially on the bosses.
I personally find camera shake annoying, but yeah, I think we have to make explosions stand out more!
Criticism about small variety of bullets and enemies is genuine too; sadly, there is not much we can do about the ships because of the budget, but we will try to add more bullet art variety.

Thank you again and good luck in your development!!
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Re: Vulture Strike, develpment and updates

Post by Fat Pug Studio »

Cristian_CL wrote:I thank you sincerely for this thoughtful feedback and for taking the time to check the demo!

I think we have to improve the damage feedback still, specially on the bosses.
I personally find camera shake annoying, but yeah, I think we have to make explosions stand out more!
Criticism about small variety of bullets and enemies is genuine too; sadly, there is not much we can do about the ships because of the budget, but we will try to add more bullet art variety.

Thank you again and good luck in your development!!
I think just a regular white flashing would be fine for bosses, don't need much. Screen shakes don't really fit into this type of shmup, but yeah, some explosion variety would be cool, if nothing, a few variations and some random exposion rotation works wonders :)

I'll be playing it some more and leave some more feedback when i find the time, it's fun and challenging, that's most important!
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Re: Vulture Strike, develpment and updates

Post by Cristian_CL »

Thank you Fat Pug Studio for your valuable feedback!

Today we updated the Steam demo (to 0.93).
- We fixed a minor bug that very few people experienced related to the fade-in transition when beginning levels.
- Minor balance tweaks to level 3.
- Changed the look of the Wormhole effect. We completely removed that animated effect we had before which was weird, and instead put a more clean visual effect that actually "covers" the "border" between the timelines.

Luckily someone reported that weird fade-in bug because it never happened before to anyone in the team or to any of the testers!
At the end we decided to allow players to upload scores after retrying levels but reseting their score to 0 when they retry; instead of allowing them to keep the score but disable their ability to upload scores after retrying. I think it is more intuitive that way.

We will have to improve the explosions I think and the overall "flashiness" of the game, the game doesn't look very exciting and most complaints are related to that.

Thank you everyone who has seen the game or has read this thread! I hope you have a good day.
Last edited by Cristian_CL on Mon Dec 11, 2017 8:14 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Vulture Strike, develpment and updates

Post by Cristian_CL »

Good day.

Today we have updated the demo and several aspects have been improved (V.0.97), only the Windows and Linux versions for now though [Edit: mac version has just been updated as well to 0.97] .

The main improvement is that we included an in-game user guide that explains the basics of survival and scoring. It was a mistake on our part to not have that from the very beginning, we thought "survival mechanics are simple enough, and anyone who is going to try the game has at least seen a screenshot or video before" and we were wrong. After the Greenlight campaign, we could finally publish a demo on Steam, then we saw a guy who uploaded a video to youtube of him trying the game and he didn't open a single Wormhole when playing, he just never knew there was this mechanic that allows you to switch to the second timeline, it was like watching someone play Ikaruga without knowing you can switch polarities, but worse, because this game puts you in trouble very early if you don't understand the system. So, lesson learned: the game needs to be explained, it's not as "obvious" as we thought and it should be expected that some people will just see something new appear on the store and get it without even seeing the screenshots before. 100% mistake on our part, it is better now hopefully with the user guide.

The second important improvement is related to the Visions system: basically, the shader was modified to show the enemy ships in a different, less obtrusive way. Instead of just a solid sillhouette, it now shows the geometry edges with solid lines, and the inner parts of the model are shown with a noisy transparency/ color filling and some expanding waves that are placed according to the position of the player ship... yeah that's a weird description:
Image Image

However, the bullets still look like they did before so they are effectively more visible that the ships when they are on the parallel timeline.
For this change to make sense, several tweaks had to be made to the levels too, so that the ships themselves don't represent as much danger as the bullets. In this game, if you collide with the enemies you die, and there used to be many fast moving enemies that tried to kill you by colliding with you, some of them were almost as fast as bullets; those enemies have been slowed down considerably and many of their routes have been modified (some have been removed completely). That means that switching timelines and landing right in the place of an enemy that was moving very fast is now much less probable. All of that was made in an attempt to keep the screen cleaner, less busy and less overwhelming, while keeping the game fair. If something is going to be less visible, it also needs to be less dangerous. The thing is that the game looks cleaner now, and ships on the parallel timeline are both less dangerous and less visually obtrusive.

Some minor bugs were also fixed, and some visual effects improved. Also, performance has been very slightly improved by optimizing geometry on the environments.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/63559 ... re_Strike/
In-game user guide: https://youtu.be/xuht1PGxTpE
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Re: Vulture Strike, develpment and updates

Post by Cristian_CL »

Hello.
Many things have been made these months.
Today we finally updated the demo on Steam to V.1.0: http://store.steampowered.com/app/63559 ... re_Strike/
Release date will also be announced soon, we just want to be 1000% sure about it. The price for the game will be U$9 but will have a -20% discount following the release date so it will be around U$7.20 for some time.

One of the biggest things we had to do was almost entirely re-work the environments, we had messed up one very important optimization process which never actually worked as intended. Before, we had more of a "3D" environment and camera movement (just like many 2.5D shmups where the camera gets a bit crazy sometimes), we always had occlusion culling maps in each environment, which were meant to prevent the rendering of objects that were being covered by others in respect to the camera position at each particular moment. For example, if a castle was close to the camera and behind the castle were some trees, those trees are not supposed to be rendered if the castle is between them and the camera, that's a pretty simple thing to achieve; then, if the camera moves around the castle, the trees might need to be rendered accordingly. Standard stuff in 3D to not waste rendering time and achieve fast enough FPS. However, because we are working with multi-scene setups for the time travel mechanic, occlusion culling maps, which were separate (one for each of the scenes, as in one for the standard timeline and a different one for the "devastated/ snowy timeline) were not being read appropriately, and there was never occlusion culling. The result was that the camera was always rendering things, even when those things were not visible because other objects were between them and the camera, and we were also wasting some memory on the culling maps themselves that were not working at all but were still "there"; because the game still had very limited geometry and was targeted for relatively old machines, the game mostly ran fine on tester's and our computers, but we were wasting some completely unnecesary rendering time because of this stupid mistake that we should have been aware of before. We could have made the occlusion culling work but it was going to take some time to figure it out to do it properly, so we decided to ditch occlusion culling altogether and re-work the environments to allow a more "linear" camera movement in typical side-scroller fashion (left to right, period). We improved performance significantly by doing just that, and we even got reports from testers that were getting 60FPS on machines that didn't even meet the minimum requirements (at 720p though).

Besides that, we fixed some minor bugs and added a few more rendering options to allow the game to run fine on monitors faster than 60hz. The game still needs to run at 60FPS, so on faster monitors it's going to be limited to that anyway.

Performance was also improved further, and some graphical tweaks were made, it's still a pretty simple game visually, smooth FPS is top priority. The gameplay was also improved by doing some balance tweaks on the levels. Also, we added an option to select up to 9 lives on practice mode, and just made all the levels available for practice mode from the beginning.

Online leaderboards have been tested and are working fine for all people (not available in the demo).

I hope you consider trying it out now!
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Greetings.
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Re: Vulture Strike, develpment and updates

Post by Cristian_CL »

We are finally ready for release on 2017.12.19, it has been a nightmare.

Release trailer: https://youtu.be/3RrMaYjoS6k


I hope you give the demo a try and enjoy it!
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