New shooter in early development, looking for advice etc.

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TheDogCatcher
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Re: New shooter in early development, looking for advice etc

Post by TheDogCatcher »

Well, my reasoning for the bullet speed/rate increase is more about the ease of hitting smaller/moving enemies than the damage. Bullet travel speed + Damage buff might work about as well as speed + firing rate buff. The Green weapon might benefit from firing rate more than the Red, since it's so narrow that it can just go between the gaps of some of the formations.
Also, there's still the matter of being able to pile up Red or Green bullets when your speed is maxed out, if you care about that.

ok I'll try the shot speed/fire rate tweak first, and see how that pans out, I'm not sure if I'll be able to totally eliminate the shot stacking thing though.
I was talking about having to wait and see if it's a weapon pick-up that you may or may not want, so this wouldn't help with that at all.
ah ok, I'll see if I can figure out a fix for that.
I really wish I could say what's the game, what's just my laptop being incredibly outdated, and what's just Unity living up to its reputation.
I've been running the game with the stats window on and I'm seeing a few framerate drops, the average on my system is around 70 fps but every now and then it'll drop to around 60 fps, this is barely noticeable to me but maybe what you are seeing is a magnification of that due to your lower hardware specs. My best guess at the moment is that it might be caused by the explosions, I'll try and reduce the amount of particles used in the explosion effects and see if that makes a difference.
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TheDogCatcher
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Re: New shooter in early development, looking for advice etc

Post by TheDogCatcher »

One thing that might be causing the game to slow down is the number of trees on the islands, I noticed during the second boss battle that my fps was dropping to under 40 so I tried deleting a number of trees on the beach and this resulted in a significant improvement in performance.

if you could check to see whether the number of trees on the islands in any way corresponds with your performance drops this would be really helpful.
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Re: New shooter in early development, looking for advice etc

Post by TheDogCatcher »

I've uploaded another update to the demos, here are the links :


LINKS REMOVED - project updated




and here is a list of changes :
Features :

- added voices to powerups.

- added voice volume slider to options menu.

- added more wreckage to scenery.

- reduced health of type C enemies from 60 to 45.

- added music volume slider to options menu.

- raised maximum volume for music but set the default value to 50%.

- added health bars to type C and D enemies.

- increased fire rate and movement speed of red and green weapons.


Fixes :

- fixed issued with main menu buttons overlapping.

- fixed issue where level complete message would show even if player had 0 lives left.

- reduced width of hitbox for player ship wings.

- changed explosion effects for powerup carriers so that they don't obscure the powerups as much.

- reduced damage done by green weapon as it was too effective against bosses with the new fire rate.

- reduced lifetime of all player weapons as it was too easy to destroy some enemies while offscreen.


Optimisation:

- reduced particle effects on explosions in attempt to boost performance.

- reduced number of particles used on enemy bullet effects.

- removed trees to boost performance on slower machines.
Also worth noting is the fact that I've removed even more trees from the Lite version of the demo, it would be interesting to find out if this helps cure any performance issues.

As always a full list of changes can be found in the included Changelog.txt file.
Last edited by TheDogCatcher on Thu Nov 30, 2017 8:20 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: New shooter in early development, looking for advice etc

Post by TheDogCatcher »

I've just uploaded a video of me playing the first level (badly) to Youtube :


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLfrJO0UZMM
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Re: New shooter in early development, looking for advice etc

Post by TheDogCatcher »

To my horror I've just discovered that there is already a game called Erebus, I thought I'd checked pretty thoroughly before deciding on the name but obviously not.....

The other Erebus is an RPG for mobile which might explain why I missed it the first time around as I may only have checked Steam for any games with the same name, anyhow this leaves me with a bit of a dilema, so I'm considering changing the name to Operation Erebus hopefully this will avoid any confusion/law suits.
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Re: New shooter in early development, looking for advice etc

Post by mamboFoxtrot »

TheDogCatcher wrote:One thing that might be causing the game to slow down is the number of trees on the islands, I noticed during the second boss battle that my fps was dropping to under 40 so I tried deleting a number of trees on the beach and this resulted in a significant improvement in performance.

if you could check to see whether the number of trees on the islands in any way corresponds with your performance drops this would be really helpful.
Honestly, I can't find any pattern to it. I even tried having Performance Monitor up to double-check that it's not a background process on my end (and I just recently did a system restore to go back to Windows 7, so I can't be loaded up with too much crapware right now). What's weird is that I'm not even seeing any spiking of the CPU, Disk, or anything really, when this happens. I've really got no clue.
Though, to note, if I pause the game and wait it will eventually clear up, so it's probably not related to any immediate stage element like tree counts.
Are you showing this anywhere else on the internet? I'd hate to think I'm the only person who's playtested any of this.

reduced damage done by green weapon as it was too effective against bosses with the new fire rate.
have you tried using the spread shot on the bosses, though? It melts them.
reduced lifetime of all player weapons as it was too easy to destroy some enemies while offscreen.
Wouldn't it make more sense to just zap the bullets when they're offscreen? I can't remember if that's something easy to test or not in Unity.
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Re: New shooter in early development, looking for advice etc

Post by TheDogCatcher »

Honestly, I can't find any pattern to it. I even tried having Performance Monitor up to double-check that it's not a background process on my end (and I just recently did a system restore to go back to Windows 7, so I can't be loaded up with too much crapware right now). What's weird is that I'm not even seeing any spiking of the CPU, Disk, or anything really, when this happens. I've really got no clue.
Though, to note, if I pause the game and wait it will eventually clear up, so it's probably not related to any immediate stage element like tree counts.

did you notice any improvement with the latest release at all ?

framerates are far more stable on my end.

Are you showing this anywhere else on the internet? I'd hate to think I'm the only person who's playtested any of this.
I've got threads running on both the Playmaker and Unity forums but so far your feedback has been the most indepth, I've also had some good feedback from the Playmaker forums but nothing from the Unity ones at all....

Wouldn't it make more sense to just zap the bullets when they're offscreen? I can't remember if that's something easy to test or not in Unity.
I'll have an ask on the Playmaker forums and see if anyone knows a way of doing this.

have you tried using the spread shot on the bosses, though? It melts them.

I must admit I haven't tried it, I don't get as much time to test as I'd like.

I always knew that weapon balance would be a tough thing to get right, I've already increased the health of the bosses by around 30% in the current build and now that I've reduced the health of some of the mid sized enemies I might try lowering the damage done by the blue weapon.
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Re: New shooter in early development, looking for advice etc

Post by mamboFoxtrot »

To be fair, spread shots are traditionally problematic for balancing. See: Contra :lol:
That said, have you set up any special debug/testing functions for yourself in the game/project? When you start getting into making and testing stages, you'll want to be able to do things for testing purposes like start from anywhere in the stage, switch weapons, or turn on invincibility etc. Setting up stuff like that saves a lot of time in the long run.
did you notice any improvement with the latest release at all ?

framerates are far more stable on my end.
Yeah, the CPU usage was lower for this build. Though, it turns out I've been paying attention to the wrong thing. The spikes aren't coinciding with the CPU usage at all (in fact with the settings I ran it on it was averaging ~50%), but when I downloaded GPU-Z to monitor my bottom-tier integrated laptop graphics card instead, I noticed that the framerate drops were instead coinciding with the GPU load maxing out (and the power usage and clock speed drop to near-bottom when this happens, too), but the times that it maxed out didn't seem to correlate to anything in particular happening in-game. I don't really understand this at all, so I'll have to keep looking into it, because if this is actually something on my end (or, at least, if there's something I can do to compensate), that would be nice to figure out so that Unity games aren't all off-limits to me.

- - -

Oh, and the weirdest thing happened this time: sometimes the Life-dropping enemies that appear before the bosses were invisible and very close to the other drop-ship. At least twice I went for the one drop, only to suddenly take damage and hear the "Life Up" clip.
Speaking of life, minor nitpick, but you should probably change "Lives" to "Life" in the UI, since you're not actually dying and coming back when you get hit.
Last edited by mamboFoxtrot on Thu Nov 23, 2017 9:19 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: New shooter in early development, looking for advice etc

Post by TheDogCatcher »

I think I've managed to balance the weapons a bit better for the next release, I've been playing through the level with one weapon at a time to get an idea of how each one performs in different situations and as a result I've made several tweaks.

I'm also looking into using pooling as a way to handle onscreen objects which should produce some performance benefits, at the moment I'm just creating/destroying stuff which is apparently a bad way to go about things .

Oh, and the weirdest thing happened this time: some of the Life-dropping enemies that appear before the bosses were invisible and very close to the other drop-ship. At least twice I went for the one drop, only to suddenly take damage and hear the "Life Up" clip.
Speaking of life, minor nitpick, but you should probably change "Lives" to "Life" in the UI, since you're not actually dying and coming back when you get hit.
oh that is very strange, I've never encountered anything like this before, has it happened often ?
Last edited by TheDogCatcher on Thu Nov 23, 2017 9:18 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: New shooter in early development, looking for advice etc

Post by mamboFoxtrot »

Yeah, pooling is definitely something you want to do! Creating/destroying is a lot of overhead.
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Re: New shooter in early development, looking for advice etc

Post by TheDogCatcher »

I think I've figured out what was going on with the invisible powerup carriers, watch what happens if you let one fly off the bottom of the screen without shooting it.

Sometimes they will reappear in the the middle of the screen for a brief fraction of a second and I think this may be what you were running into, anyway I've fixed it for now.

As for integrating pooling into my project I honestly don't know where to begin with this, so many of the game's systems are interlinked that it's kind of like trying to unravel a huge ball of tangled string. As someone who's still kind of a newb at this sort of thing I find it frustrating that there are tutorials out there teaching people to use such bad practices as creating/destroying objects in the first place, now I don't know how to undo the mess I've created :(
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Re: New shooter in early development, looking for advice etc

Post by mamboFoxtrot »

Ey, I know them feels. The code you see used in tutorials can often be pretty whack. Which makes sense from a short-term "let's see some results" perspective, but I feel like these tutorials should point out when it is they're doing "hacky" code.
I also know the feels of having to unravel your own hacked-together code. On another forum I'm on they were having a "revive a cancelled project" event, and when I dragged out some old shmup project from a few years ago, I honestly couldn't fucking figure out what half the shit I typed down was actually doing, and was generally horrified at how scattered-about a lot of the code was. :lol:

Though, thinking back to the last time I looked into object pooling for Unity, I remember seeing comments that the create/destroy protocols were inproved for Unity 5, so unless you're targeting mobile, pooling is probably only going to show an improvement for something like rapid-fired bullets or really elaborate prefab objects. It might not really be necessary to give yourself a headache with this, but if you have any future ambitions with making games it might be a worthwhile learning experience regardless.
I think I've figured out what was going on with the invisible powerup carriers, watch what happens if you let one fly off the bottom of the screen without shooting it.

Sometimes they will reappear in the the middle of the screen for a brief fraction of a second and I think this may be what you were running into, anyway I've fixed it for now.
Now that you mention it, yeah, I think that is what I saw.

- - -

Also, I forgot to mention these two things last time, but:
- the buttons for the game over screen are still messed up
- I don't think the bullets don't move along with the screen-scrolling? That might seem weird to point out, but it means that if you ever change the speed of the scrolling, the utility of the player's weapons might be affected, or even rendered useless if you decide to go full "Gradius high-speed stage". Aimed enemy shots will also miss at high speed unless you specifically program them to lead their shots.
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Re: New shooter in early development, looking for advice etc

Post by TheDogCatcher »

- the buttons for the game over screen are still messed up
I hadn't noticed this,I'll check it out though, is this with the lite version of the game ?

- I don't think the bullets don't move along with the screen-scrolling? That might seem weird to point out, but it means that if you ever change the speed of the scrolling, the utility of the player's weapons might be affected, or even rendered useless if you decide to go full "Gradius high-speed stage". Aimed enemy shots will also miss at high speed unless you specifically program them to lead their shots.

I'm not entirely sure I understand what you mean by this but I'll try experimenting with different scroll speeds to see if they have any adverse effects on gameplay, not that I'm really planning on ramping up the scroll speed at any point in the game, but it would still be nice to know for future reference if nothing else.


I've been thinking about your performance problems and I was wondering if it might be an issue with memory. I'm not sure if I remember this correctly but do laptop GPU's sometimes not have their own RAM and instead rely on using a portion of the system RAM ? When you said that pausing the game seemed to help it made me think that maybe it was some kind of buffering issue.
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Re: New shooter in early development, looking for advice etc

Post by mamboFoxtrot »

TheDogCatcher wrote:
- the buttons for the game over screen are still messed up
I hadn't noticed this,I'll check it out though, is this with the lite version of the game ?
It's with both versions of the game. Checking it a bit more, it's all the menus. It seems the click regions are too large and bleed into each other. Resolution settings don't change anything.

I've been thinking about your performance problems and I was wondering if it might be an issue with memory. I'm not sure if I remember this correctly but do laptop GPU's sometimes not have their own RAM and instead rely on using a portion of the system RAM ? When you said that pausing the game seemed to help it made me think that maybe it was some kind of buffering issue.
I dunno. GPU-Z list's N/A for Memory Size, while Steam's Hardware Survey analysis says I have 1839 MB of Primary VRAM. Anyways seem to have I found the fix to the problem, and can even run the regular version of the game at a respectable 1280x720/High Quality mode with only minimal, inconsequential frame-drops. I just had to...
yanno....
update my drivers

yeah, I'm fukkin dumb, dude :lol: A veritable troglodyte trying to navigate the field of technology
I am so sorry to have wasted your time with this bullshit.
But in my defense! Windows told me my drivers were up to date, and Intel's website said I was up to date, too, except they still presented me in a half-hidden fashion a driver to update to, but when I ran the installer it failed and seemed to tell me that it wasn't for my system. Turns out what I had to do was manually uninstall the old driver first.
Shit like this is why I choose the Console Peasant life when I can...
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Re: New shooter in early development, looking for advice etc

Post by TheDogCatcher »

I dunno. GPU-Z list's N/A for Memory Size, while Steam's Hardware Survey analysis says I have 1839 MB of Primary VRAM. Anyways seem to have I found the fix to the problem, and can even run the regular version of the game at a respectable 1280x720/High Quality mode with only minimal, inconsequential frame-drops. I just had to...
yanno....
update my drivers


yeah, I'm fukkin dumb, dude :lol: A veritable troglodyte trying to navigate the field of technology
I am so sorry to have wasted your time with this bullshit.

no worries I've been guilty of worse in my time, I once returned a GTX 970 thinking it was faulty but the problem actually turned out to be a bad stick of RAM....... :roll:

anyhow it wasn't a total waste of time as I was able to introduce a few useful optimisations that even improved the performance on my machine.

It's with both versions of the game. Checking it a bit more, it's all the menus. It seems the click regions are too large and bleed into each other. Resolution settings don't change anything.
that's odd I'm sure I fixed all of that stuff, it seems to work OK on my machine and I haven't had any reports of it happening to anyone else , you are using version 4 of the demo right ?

also on the options screen are the volume sliders and checkboxes for the player life selector working ok ?
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Re: New shooter in early development, looking for advice etc

Post by mamboFoxtrot »

I guess "messed up" isn't the right terminology, but instead "still inaccurate". It's definitely improved from the previous version, but, well, here's a GIF
Spoiler
Image
So, you can see how far outside the button the activation region is, and how when moving upwards from one button to another, you have to go farther than you should to get the higher-up button to activate again. It almost looks like the whole graphic of the cursor is being used rather than just the point, but there's no real way to know that for sure on my end.

The options screen fares better. The only problem with the volume sliders is that for some reason only the lighter upper half of them are clickable. The lives boxes technically are oversized, but only horizontally so it's not a problem - in fact it just makes clicking on those easier so it's all good there.

edit: on the topic of performance, are you using "baked" lighting at all?
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Re: New shooter in early development, looking for advice etc

Post by TheDogCatcher »

Ah, I see what you mean, I don't know why the clickable area is bigger than the button is, I spent all day yesterday trying to fix it, I tried changing every setting I could think of but nothing seemed to work. I did however find a few other minor issues that I was able to resolve in the process but nothing I did seemed to affect the clickable area of the buttons in any way.... most strange.

edit: on the topic of performance, are you using "baked" lighting at all?
I'm using baked lighting for the terrain, I'm not sure if I saw an option to bake the lighting for the meshes though.
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Re: New shooter in early development, looking for advice etc

Post by TheDogCatcher »

I've figured out what was causing the issues with the buttons, it was the text not the button itself, I should have guessed really as it only started happening when I switched over to TextMesh pro, anyway the issue is now resolved. :mrgreen:
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Re: New shooter in early development, looking for advice etc

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A new version of the demo is up, here's the link :


LINK REMOVED - project updated


There's no Lite version this time as I've been having some issues with my Dev PC, it looks like I'm going to have to reinstall windows, so things have been a little rushed this time around. I'm not really sure if the Lite version is all that neccessary anyway I may scrap it for future builds unless anyone specifically asks for it.

Anyway here's a list of changes for the latest version:

Features :

- changed game name to Operation Erebus and updated the logo.

- increased boss 1 health to 900 from 700.

- increased boss 2 health to 1350 from 1000.

- increased fire rate of green weapon to 0.2 from 0.22.

- decreased damage from green weapon to 5.5 from 6.0.

- increased fire rate of blue weapon to 0.11 from 0.12.

- decreased damage from blue weapon to 2 from 4.

- decreased health of type c enemies to 40 from 45.

- all bullets both enemy and player are now destroyed when leaving the screen.

- added a warning message for when enemy bosses are approaching.

- several changes made to scenery.




Fixes :

- fixed issue where the clickable area of the buttons was bigger than the button itself.

- fixed several minor issues with the GUI.

- Increased the size of clickable areas for the volume sliders on the options screen.

- fixed issue where enemy powerup carriers would occaisionally reappear in the center of the screen if not destroyed before exiting the screen.
Last edited by TheDogCatcher on Mon Dec 11, 2017 2:49 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: New shooter in early development, looking for advice etc

Post by M.Knight »

Grabbed the latest demo and gave it a few tries. The furthest I went so far is the middle of the second stage. (Or is it the second loop of the first stage?)

Here are my comments :

-I expected to be able to navigate the menus with the directionnal buttons. While the mouse support works rather well, the game itself doesn't need it so it is odd to have to switch between the mouse for the menus and the keyboard for the game.
-Speaking of the controls, how many buttons are there in the game? AFAIK, you can move and shoot, but that's about it. The default start-up Unity input window has more buttons than that (Fire1, Fire2, etc.) which can be confusing so consider removing the useless buttons and only keeping those you will use.
-The post-hit invincibility is kinda short. The first time I got hit, I got hit again before realizing what happened and retreating.
-The music you have chosen kinda matches the military theme but not the intensity. While the stage takes place over a rather calm yet devastated ocean, the music sounds like it was rather made for the climax of a war movie. It is too over-the-top for your stage I think.
-The yellow power-up's voice clip sounds more like "Sniper" or "Slypher" than "Life-up". It also wasn't immediatly obvious the item increased my life counter because it is shaped exactly like the other weapon capsule. Why not have three different types of visuals for the speed-up capsules, the weapon items, and the extra lives? As they all have different purposes, they shouldn't have similar appearances.
-Stage 1 is a bit too long. 2 to 3 minutes is fine, but 4 and a half minutes can be a bit frustrating considering you have to play this stage every time you start a new run. Besides, not only you do have a midboss and a boss, but the waves themselves often have some dead air between them. Some of those waves are also repeated a noticeable amount of times without having any changes to them compared to the previous times they were used. As a result, the pacing can be tightened by reducing the repetition and making sure there aren't too many moments with nothing on the screen. A small pause in the action before bosses is fine though.
-The wave weapon is pretty fun to use. I don't think it is the most powerful, but it can still very quickly kill some of the bigger ennemies if you point-blank them with it.
-There aren't many different types of ennemies : 3-4 for a single stage doesn't seem like a lot, especially if the waves themselves don't offer a lot of variety. Towards the end of the stage, there is some mixing going on with different types of ennemies at once, that's interesting.
-The boss and mid-boss patterns are very similar. Try to differentiate each boss to give them a specific identity.
-There isn't a restart option in the menu. That could come in handy.
-Where is the hitbox located? Does it cover the whole ship without the wings? I thought it would only be the cockpit, but I think I got hit in the ship's nose and still got damaged.
-I am not too fond of the small, difficult to see orange bullets. When you know the ennemy patterns, the reduced lisibility is less of a threat but it can still be kinda annoying.
-There seems to be an interval between the moment the boss dies and the moment it stops firing.
-Is the second level simply a repeat of the first one? If not, consider changing the background to give that stage its own location, identity and feel. The first level ended with the ship reaching a specific beach. Why not have the following stage be the city behind that beach or something similar for example?
-The bosses weren't too long with the colored weapons and a bit of point-blanking, but I can see them getting a bit long with the default gun and given they only have one pattern, they could also become boring fast enough. You should make sure they don't outlast the number of patterns they have.
-The speed indicator uses arbitrary values (30, 35, etc.). If you have 4 speed values, I would simply indicate that number between 1 and 4. Some games (the Star Soldier series, Eschatos and probabl a ton of Megadrive shmups) represent the speed level with arrows. That could convey that piece of information better than a number whose beginning and end don't immediatly make sense.


Good luck with your game!
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Re: New shooter in early development, looking for advice etc

Post by TheDogCatcher »

some great feedback there, thankyou for posting . :)

I'll try and address as many of your points as I can.
-I expected to be able to navigate the menus with the directionnal buttons. While the mouse support works rather well, the game itself doesn't need it so it is odd to have to switch between the mouse for the menus and the keyboard for the game.
When playing with the keyboard I use the mouse for firing so I hadn't really noticed much of an issue with this, at one point I had it so that the menu buttons could be navigated using a control pad but it was buggy as all hell so I changed it to mouse only, I may reintroduce controller navigation if I can find a way to make it work without any bugs.
-Speaking of the controls, how many buttons are there in the game? AFAIK, you can move and shoot, but that's about it. The default start-up Unity input window has more buttons than that (Fire1, Fire2, etc.) which can be confusing so consider removing the useless buttons and only keeping those you will use.
Yeah there is only move and fire at the moment but I have been considering adding features such as shields and bombs, so there may end up being more controls eventually, I'll look into narrowing the options down though so that it's less confusing.
-The post-hit invincibility is kinda short. The first time I got hit, I got hit again before realizing what happened and retreating.
At the moment you get 1.5 seconds of invincibility, which I thought was enough time for the player to get to safety, is the invincibility period too short or do I need to make it more obvious to the player that they've been hit ?
-The music you have chosen kinda matches the military theme but not the intensity. While the stage takes place over a rather calm yet devastated ocean, the music sounds like it was rather made for the climax of a war movie. It is too over-the-top for your stage I think.
The music that I'm currrently using is just a placeholder really, at the moment I'm having discussions with someone regarding an original soundtrack, I won't say too much just yet incase I jinx it, but if things go as planned it's going to be something a bit special. :mrgreen:
-The yellow power-up's voice clip sounds more like "Sniper" or "Slypher" than "Life-up". It also wasn't immediatly obvious the item increased my life counter because it is shaped exactly like the other weapon capsule. Why not have three different types of visuals for the speed-up capsules, the weapon items, and the extra lives? As they all have different purposes, they shouldn't have similar appearances.

You're not the first person to mention the appearance of the life capsule, I'm obvioulsy going to have to give this some more thought.
-Stage 1 is a bit too long. 2 to 3 minutes is fine, but 4 and a half minutes can be a bit frustrating considering you have to play this stage every time you start a new run. Besides, not only you do have a midboss and a boss, but the waves themselves often have some dead air between them. Some of those waves are also repeated a noticeable amount of times without having any changes to them compared to the previous times they were used. As a result, the pacing can be tightened by reducing the repetition and making sure there aren't too many moments with nothing on the screen. A small pause in the action before bosses is fine though.

Some good points I'll look into stage length some more and up the pace a bit, moving the waves a bit closer together where needed.
-There aren't many different types of ennemies : 3-4 for a single stage doesn't seem like a lot, especially if the waves themselves don't offer a lot of variety. Towards the end of the stage, there is some mixing going on with different types of ennemies at once, that's interesting.
I don't mean to come accross as a pedant but there are infact 5 enemy types, if I can get the level length down a bit it might not seem quite as bad.
-The boss and mid-boss patterns are very similar. Try to differentiate each boss to give them a specific identity.
I must admit that this is something that I've struggled with, I'm thinking of changing the main bosses fire pattern when it's health gets down to halfway.
-There isn't a restart option in the menu. That could come in handy.
godd idea, I'll add one. :)
-Where is the hitbox located? Does it cover the whole ship without the wings? I thought it would only be the cockpit, but I think I got hit in the ship's nose and still got damaged.
The main hitbox covers pretty much the entire body of the ship, with a smaller secondary one that covers half of the wings, I'll look into tweaking this a bit more possibly making the main one a bit smaller.

-I am not too fond of the small, difficult to see orange bullets. When you know the ennemy patterns, the reduced lisibility is less of a threat but it can still be kinda annoying.
Other people have also mentioned this but honestly I don't have any problem seeing the bullets and I've already enlarged them quite a bit compared to their original size, I wonder if the particles are rendering for you properly, maybe a screenshot would help.
-There seems to be an interval between the moment the boss dies and the moment it stops firing.
Yeah the bosses do continue to fire as they fall to the ground but those bullets shouldn't be able to hit you, I'm still looking into an adequate solution to this issue.
-Is the second level simply a repeat of the first one? If not, consider changing the background to give that stage its own location, identity and feel. The first level ended with the ship reaching a specific beach. Why not have the following stage be the city behind that beach or something similar for example?
Yeah at the moment it's pretty much just one level on repeat, I do intend to have other levels eventually and have plans for most of them in my head, I just want to get the first one as polished as I can before starting work on any more.

-The bosses weren't too long with the colored weapons and a bit of point-blanking, but I can see them getting a bit long with the default gun and given they only have one pattern, they could also become boring fast enough. You should make sure they don't outlast the number of patterns they have.
The bosses shouldn't take much longer to defeat with the default weapon but I may still beef it up a little bit more to bring it inline with the rest, I'll need to do some more testing first .

-The speed indicator uses arbitrary values (30, 35, etc.). If you have 4 speed values, I would simply indicate that number between 1 and 4. Some games (the Star Soldier series, Eschatos and probabl a ton of Megadrive shmups) represent the speed level with arrows. That could convey that piece of information better than a number whose beginning and end don't immediatly make sense.

I like the arrows idea a lot I'll see what I can do about that.


thanks once again for your feedback, it's been very helpful.


-mark
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Re: New shooter in early development, looking for advice etc

Post by M.Knight »

TheDogCatcher wrote: Yeah there is only move and fire at the moment but I have been considering adding features such as shields and bombs, so there may end up being more controls eventually, I'll look into narrowing the options down though so that it's less confusing.
Bombs are always cool to have, but be careful with shields : make sure the game is clearable without needing shields. They can be a helpful tool for players but must never be mandatory to make progress in the game. If that happens, it means you have designed unfair ennemy patterns, so if you add shield power-ups, make sure to test the game with but also without them. ;)
TheDogCatcher wrote: At the moment you get 1.5 seconds of invincibility, which I thought was enough time for the player to get to safety, is the invincibility period too short or do I need to make it more obvious to the player that they've been hit ?
Depending on the player character's sprite/3D model, various ways to show it received damage exist. Spaceships often explode and respawn at the bottom of the screen, and human characters get hit with a special animation without disappearing and respawning. Obviously, this is not an absolute rule and what matters is that the player knows he got hit.
In your case, I think it is fine on the visual side with the small screen flash and the blinking ship. The sound effect can be drowned in the other explosions going on though.

I would also increase the invincibility. 3 seconds seems fine to me.

Another comment : I would make the ship explode immediatly when losing its last life instead of having it steer off in a random direction that makes the player feel like he still has control over it even though he doesn't. If you want to keep a longer animation before making the ship explode, I recommend making it different from the ship's regular movement. You could make it lose altitude and crash on the floor/ocean while staying at the same (x,y) coordinates for example.
TheDogCatcher wrote: I don't mean to come accross as a pedant but there are infact 5 enemy types, if I can get the level length down a bit it might not seem quite as bad.
My bad! 5 ennemy types is better indeed. The two small ennemy types that come from the sides have a very similar visual style, which can make it difficult to notice the differences. It is important to have a central theme and atmosphere to avoid having enemy designs look random (unless you have a crazy atmosphere à la Illvelo where random-looking ennemies is the point) but the designs should be easily distinguishable from one another. For example, why not give a lighter shade of gray to one of the two small ennemies that come from the sides?
TheDogCatcher wrote: I must admit that this is something that I've struggled with, I'm thinking of changing the main bosses fire pattern when it's health gets down to halfway.
Yep, that's the way to go! Phases give the player a sense of progression within the boss fight and alleviate repetition and bordeom. If you can have more than a pattern in each single phase, that's even better.
TheDogCatcher wrote:Other people have also mentioned this but honestly I don't have any problem seeing the bullets and I've already enlarged them quite a bit compared to their original size, I wonder if the particles are rendering for you properly, maybe a screenshot would help.
Here's a screnshot if it can help you :
Spoiler
Image
I think the bullets' tiny size and orange color can make them a bit difficult to see amidst explosions. Why not give them a black outline or something like that to make them stand out a bit more?
TheDogCatcher wrote: thanks once again for your feedback, it's been very helpful.
You are welcome!
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Re: New shooter in early development, looking for advice etc

Post by mamboFoxtrot »

TheDogCatcher wrote:There's no Lite version this time as I've been having some issues with my Dev PC, it looks like I'm going to have to reinstall windows, so things have been a little rushed this time around. I'm not really sure if the Lite version is all that neccessary anyway I may scrap it for future builds unless anyone specifically asks for it.
Probably for the better. Anyone with my laptop's specs or worse honestly just needs to get a new damn computer :lol:
In regards to your PM, yeah, I can run the regular version well enough now, @ 1280x720/High Quality at least.
-The bosses weren't too long with the colored weapons and a bit of point-blanking, but I can see them getting a bit long with the default gun and given they only have one pattern, they could also become boring fast enough. You should make sure they don't outlast the number of patterns they have.
The bosses shouldn't take much longer to defeat with the default weapon but I may still beef it up a little bit more to bring it inline with the rest, I'll need to do some more testing first .
Yeah, the default weapon seems to be about tied with the Red weapon's forward shot. I don't think it's lagging too bad behind Blue or Green.
The weapon balance in general seems to be about right in this version, as far as I can tell. I didn't really test it too much, though.


Minor Nitpicking Time: The boss warning message is a bit awkward, assuming it's supposed to be displayed like

Code: Select all

WARNING ENEMY
   BOSS
APPROACHING !!
It makes a bit more sense as

Code: Select all

 WARNING!
ENEMY BOSS
APPROACHING!!
And while I'm assuming the plain text is just a placeholder, I'll still say that the red text is also pretty harsh against the blue ocean background. A white outline should help, if that's an option in Unity's text renderer.
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Re: New shooter in early development, looking for advice etc

Post by TheDogCatcher »

I've been working on a new design for the side panels and I'd very much like some feedback on their appearance.



Image


Do you folks like these better than the old ones ?
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Re: New shooter in early development, looking for advice etc

Post by mamboFoxtrot »

Yeah, I think that looks a lot better. And the player can fly with a clean conscious now that they're not forced into committing a major traffic violation! :P
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Re: New shooter in early development, looking for advice etc

Post by TheDogCatcher »

Very good point, one of my main aims with this game is to promote careful driving. :mrgreen:
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Re: New shooter in early development, looking for advice etc

Post by M.Knight »

I would add that the darker colors also increase the contrast between the play area and the panels, which makes it harder to be distracted by those side panels. :)
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Re: New shooter in early development, looking for advice etc

Post by TheDogCatcher »

I'm glad you folks like the new panels, I was a bit concerned that they might be a bit plain looking when compared to the previous ones, I've now also added a background to the pause menu buttons aswell :


Image


I'm also considering adding some kind of border to the main menu, credits and options screens using a similar style that will encompass the game logo and buttons on each screen.
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Re: New shooter in early development, looking for advice etc

Post by Shepardus »

Nitpick: The buttons are off-center in the background you added (closer to the bottom of their frames than the top).

Disclaimer: I haven't actually tried this game yet, my comments are based on the posts and screenshots in this thread.
TheDogCatcher wrote:Other people have also mentioned this but honestly I don't have any problem seeing the bullets and I've already enlarged them quite a bit compared to their original size, I wonder if the particles are rendering for you properly, maybe a screenshot would help.
I would try making the bullets as large as you can until the size becomes a problem, then shrink them down to something acceptable. The bullets right now are very small compared to most of the more highly-regarded shmups. Take, for example, this screenshot of Crimzon Clover: World Ignition (not my screenshot, just found it by Googling):

Image

Bullets come in many shapes and sizes in CC:WI but I think the ones in this screenshot are pretty average for the game, or a little larger than average. Note how large they are, both compared to the player ship and compared to the size of the play area. The latter is important not just for visibility, but also because it helps fill the available space with action. Vertical shmups traditionally have a 3:4 aspect ratio since they would be played on 4:3 CRT displays turned on their side. You don't have to follow this standard (many quality shmups don't), but if you're going to be widening your play area you'd better be making use of it so it doesn't just turn into dead space. Larger bullets is one way to fill that space and give players something to do (effectively you're shrinking the size of the play area relative to the size of the bullets). In my opinion if you're going to make the bullets smaller then there should be some purpose for that space you're saving on the screen.

You may be able to see your bullets fine right now, but that's because there isn't a whole lot going on in the scene that demands your attention. What many shmup fans are looking for are bullets that aren't just "visible," but don't take any conscious effort to notice. The more active and chaotic your scene, the more important it is that the important elements stand out from the noise.
TheDogCatcher wrote:The main hitbox covers pretty much the entire body of the ship, with a smaller secondary one that covers half of the wings, I'll look into tweaking this a bit more possibly making the main one a bit smaller.
You'll notice that many shmups have player hitboxes significantly smaller than the player sprite. This is for a good reason - players are quick to blame the game for cheating them or killing them "unfairly," and with truly "accurate" hitboxes, players can easily get the impression that they're being hit before the bullet actually touched their ship, because, among other factors, it takes a little while for a player to react to things such as a bullet coming close to them. Shrinking the player hitbox to give a bit of leeway ends up making the game feel fairer and also leaves more room for thrilling "close calls." You don't have to go full bullet hell and make the hitbox just a couple pixels (if you do then you need to fill the available space accordingly, since you're essentially enlarging the play area relative to the player ship), but even many games with notoriously "large" hitboxes typically leave some buffer room. In Detana!! TwinBee the hitboxes cover pretty much the whole ship and everybody hates the hitboxes in that game.

You can probably do without the secondary hitboxes for the wings - it's hard for players to concentrate on those edges that are away from the main focus point of the ship, especially if they rotate and move around as you turn left and right. Detana!! TwinBee has hitboxes for the arms on the sides of the ship, and it's easily the most annoying thing about the annoying hitboxes in that game. Feels like I lose my arms to bullets half a screen away...
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TheDogCatcher
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Re: New shooter in early development, looking for advice etc

Post by TheDogCatcher »

Thanks for the feedback. :)
Nitpick: The buttons are off-center in the background you added (closer to the bottom of their frames than the top).
The buttons aren't actually off center (well maybe they are a little but if anything they are slightly closer to the top than the bottom), what you are seeing is an optical illusion caused by a bevel in the background image, here's the image I'm using :

Image


As you can no doubt tell there is quite a pronounced bevel there, either way it doesn't look quite right and I'm going to need to address that somehow, probably by reducing the bevel or replacing it with a border, I don't want the background to appear completely flat but maybe having a bevel isn't the best way to go about it.

With regards to the hitbox and bullet size, I have increased the size and visibility of the bullets in the current build and I've also slightly reduced the size of the player hitbox, the only issue I have with removing the wing hitbox altogether is that the profile of the player ship is rather narrow and I don't want to make it too hard to hit. My current approach is to keep making small tweaks until I hit that sweet spot where things feel just right, it's a bit of a balancing act but I'll get there eventually.

My main concern is that if I make the bullets too large the game is going to end up being like a bullet hell shooter and that is something I'm keen to avoid, I'm aiming for something that feels a little more old school, I personally don't like shooters where the screen is too busy - I just find them confusing and messy to look at.

Thanks again for your feedback I appreciate it very much.


I'm actually thinking of using the name "Feedback Games" when I finally release the finished version, simply because of how much I rely on the feedback of others, also it doesn't appear to have been taken yet......
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