COSMONATOR shmup / rpg hybrid

[AgileMaster]

Hi shmuppers,

A friend and I have been developing a shoot-em-up / RPG hybrid called Cosmonator that we are now trying to get onto Steam Greenlight (before Steam Direct takes over!) We're hoping someone here takes an interest in that kind of combination - think hectic shmup action combined with old school RPG style character building: tons of spells, abilities, different primary and secondary weapons, etc. Even if you don't care to vote for us, feel free to download the playable demo and if you're really cool you can give us some feedback! We're new to this so we want to learn as much as possible from people trying out our game. We're really proud of it but maybe you hate it? Let us know! Here are some showcase gifs, and the links to the demo and to Greenlight are below.



Link to our Greenlight Page!

Link to the fully playable Beta.3 demo


Thanks! Hope you enjoy it!!

[thiago.kadooka]

Well, i love game with RPG progression, with upgrades and stuff, thats why i downloaded the demo and got me almost 2 hours playing it.

That thing about: "Oh my god i upgraded my weapon, now i have to play another level to use it!", thats what i think it is amazing about doing progression. Im creating a shmup focused on upgrades and weapon choice too, and i think thats a awesome feature.

I gonna write as much as i can about everything in the game as i can. (long post INCOMING!)

so, first thing, i think the game looks good, i got a sense of balance about the art and it really seems to work with each other. The small problem here is, i like particles, i really really do, but i think some people might think the game have too much of it (making it distracting). But not me though, but them i think that particle option in the menu, it does the trick.

but one thing i think is really anoying is that the explosions blends to much with the enemy bullets, this make things a little bit confusing some times, the bullet come out of the explosion all of a sudden... i think you should consider change the enemy bullet collor, or at least make it blink or something, it is really important to know where the bullets are coming from.

congrats on the amount of spells in the game, i was stunned about the amount of choices, and they are even upgradable, and aditionally with the gem for extra functionallity, really amazing.

One thing i dont understand, is why my rank multplier screw with my money... it gets worse and worse as you play, am i missing something?

a problem, that would be a deal breaker to some people, is that the game get a little "boring" or too easy, specially at the beginning.
im not talking only about "hard enemies, lots of bullets blablabla", it is some empty parts you get waiting for enemies to come (even on later levels). Maybe im getting a bit too much into this, but i think something to do or to shoot between those moments would be great, them again maybe its just me.

Also, the game seems to be a little too sparse on variety. This is a thing i struggled alot when developing my game, because, what should i do? sparse game milking every type of enemy by repeating it and overusing them alot through lots of stages, or concentrating them in a diverse but short experience? I think, this game would gain a little by concentrating a little more, because the levels take a long time to show some new enemies and cool stuff. but even if i say this, im not entirely sure about it, because i think the progression of the weapons are good, because i can get weapons in a nice steady pace, so maybe the problem is just the length and repetition, so the solution is to go back and create a little bit more diversity through the levels? or at least in the beginning for people to get that boost of "wow! this level is cool!" right at the early levels of the game.

now lets talk seriously, because i think the one thing that annoyed me the most, is that little bit delay when you move... man, this was almost a deal breaker to me... because shmup should be SMOOTH AS F*** when you move, thats the core idea, more so when you say your game is a bullet hell, because in bullet hell you need real precision when you move, and that tiny delay, really mess things up...
An example of this, is when a boss fight come, he shots a wave of bullets, i can only try to maneuver to the sides of the screen, since i dont have precision enough to swing through the bullets. As i played, i get used to this, but even so, every single bullet curtain i get, i wish the controls was more repsonsive. you should really REALLY take some serious time to look at this!

Well, so lot said, i think this game is really good! i enjoyed playing it, and looking forward to the full version! gonna buy it on steam for sure!

Good luck for you guys!

[clippa]

I can't get my arcade stick working with this, even with joytokey. Can anything be done?
Enjoyed what I played of it on the keyboard.

[AgileMaster]

Hi guys! Thanks for the prompt feedback!!

Clippa - we are still in the process of making the game compatible with as many gaming platforms as possible; at this point most controllers work but there are still some that we need to implement! Glad you enjoyed the keyboard play, but as you can imagine, yea the game is really meant to be played on a remote controller. I'll look into this asap!

Thiago - dude, first of all thanks so much for your in depth feedback! And for your awesome enthusiasm. Please reply with a link or more info about the shmup that you're creating (or once you have a playable version ready) so I can check it out!
Thanks also so much for hilighting the issues here. Some of these issues are ones that I am already trying to fix and having difficulty with. Some are more easily remedied (the game is not yet 100 percent finished, for instance, and I am currently fleshing out the earlier levels to make them more interesting with diverse enemies, to your point) but some issues are super frustrating for me - like getting a simple balance for the RPG progression system with this ranking system that I implemented long ago which just, as you say, makes things too complicated and doesn't really make sense. It's really tricky!
The bullets and explosions being confusing - I actually like that. This is where the game is more RPG than shmup. But I can see how it is an issue, just for the sake of playability, and I have earlier considered making ALL enemy bullets the same colour spectrum and all friendly bullets / spells another spectrum, both different from explosions. At this point I feel like I don't mind it being confusing, though - so as not to sacrifice all the nice different colorful effects and particles (no such thing as too many particles! But this is a good point and one that I've heard before so maybe eventually Ill buckle under pressure to make things more clear.
But your last point worries me. When I myself and any of my friends play the game, it's SUPER responsive. This is very important to me. No delay whatsoever - weaving through bullets like a ninja should be a hairtrigger, instant, pleasurable experience. I wonder if we have some incompatibility with your system? What controller are you using? Please let me know so I can look into it!

Dude, thanks again for all the feedback - and I'm super stoked you enjoyed the game! You won't be disappointed with the full version - the real RPG depth only really comes after level 20, when the Feats and Master Upgrades (which are locked in the demo) really open up the different possibilities for interesting character builds.

[thiago.kadooka]

Hey man!

well, if you want to check my game, i made a post in this forum too: http://shmups.system11.org/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=59730
If you want to play my demo, or watch the trailer you can, in this link: http://www.somosnerds.com.br/darkoldsun/

so... hey i love partciles too! i agree with you on this, there no thing such as "too much particles" hahaha! (i did LOTS of particles in my game too hahaha)

one thing, i could not even begin to try all the weapons in the game! Have to say again, congrats on this! And i really like one spell, i dont remember the name now, phantom or something... The one that makes a little ghostly ship that shoot for you for some time, i liked it so much, that i actually thinking in doing one like that in my game! (can i? )

i gonna try your game on the computer at my work, to see if there is no delay on movement. here in my home, i experienced a really tiny short delay, but to me it was noticeable enough to be annoying.
im actually not using any controller, it didnt recognize mine, (ps4 controller with steam), so i used my keyboard to play it the entire time.

But man, i feel you, its hard to balance RPG stuff, and one of the worst parts in balancing RPG, a shmup RPG, is the fact that we dont have too much reference to get from, personally for example, im struggling with weapons that do area damage, since large enemy groups with low armor gets destroyed with a single well placed shot, making that part too easy, to this day i dont have a solution for this yet

i was thinking about the money balance problem in your game, cutting money earning from the player seems like a really bad thing to do, one solution maybe, would be as you buy a new weapon/spell, every other weapon/spell gets more expensive, that way, the player knows that he need to choose more wisely which weapon he buys, and he continues to earn the normal amount of money.

or another idea,(which i actually like better) is that, for him to buy a new extra spell, he need to buy a new aditional slot, that gets more expensive as you buy.

well, enough said i guess! if you play my game, tell me what you think of it when you have some time! cya!

[AgileMaster]

Hey Thiago!
Yea for sure I'm gonna check out your game later when I'm at home!
I'll be happy if you want to use some of my ideas here like the Coverfire spell - in this genre, there is very little that is 'original' anyway, we all kinda borrow ideas from the giants that came before us right?
It also just occured to me that for the keyboard, we have a movement setting 'eagle' or 'snail' mode - try setting it to eagle mode if it isn't already, that way the ship might respond slightly faster? Though I'd be surprised if that actually fixes your playability problem. We still have to make the game compatible with different controllers, it plays much more fun on a controller! But really even on a keyboard it should be super responsive so I hope that was just a hardware issue for you.
Ranking / cash balancing - you think just like me man, I've considered all these options. I still have to find a perfect sollution. The problem is that the current system is kind of enshrined in the entire structure of the character building design of the game so changing it would take a LOT of work... I still need to think about it.
AOE damage balance - this is something that surely every action RPG coder will struggle with but that's what makes it so much fun! This is why people don't tend to combine action and RPG by the way, because it makes the balancing so difficult. What I did in Cosmonator was a: to simply make AOE spells and effects quite underpowered generally, so that they are ONLY useful for taking out clusters of enemies or bosses with many components. But another good sollution is b: to make that large explosions, or projectiles that move through many enemies (like a firewave for instance), have a limited TOTAL damage expenditure. so every time damage is dealt, to any enemy in the range, the explosion entity loses x amount of its total damage that it can still deal. this way, whether it is dealing all the damage to a single large enemy, or to many smaller ones, you can control the total amount of damage, so it's easier to balance. The drawback of this is that it is counterintuitive - splash damage should really just damage everything in the area, right? Anyway, maybe that helps. Good luck!

[Ixmucane2]

Good pixel art, good game engine and general organization, but not perfect.

Technical problems:

• Bundling a JRE half the size of your game is rude.
• Not including 64 bit libraries that are 1/20 the JRE size is inexcusable.
• The bundled JRE and the included LWJGL are both very old. In the case of the JRE, it is quite irresponsible because of the plentiful security problems.

Game:

• Replaying levels in order to "farm" score is boring, particularly when the levels can be beaten with 75% or more health (to earn the large cash bonus) the first time around.
• If players could sell off upgrades without losing money (in practice, reallocating the whole coins and gems budget to different stuff every level) they could try every upgrade without boring grinding, without wasting money on useless upgrades, and without maxing out early and in predictable ways; moreover, levels could demand extremely specialized "builds" instead of being adapted to conservative upgrade choices.
• The spell "charges" are an unwelcome surprise: I'd like to spend energy to cast spells freely. Different spells might have a different energy cost for balance reasons.
• Enemy formations are repeated and boring. The sparse and unstructured background is a contributing factor.
• Many instances of unfair shooting too close to the player's ship.

Appearance:

• Far too dark, particularly the backgrounds.
• Background images are blurred.
• Inconsistent outlines between different sprite types.

[AgileMaster]

I've been working on a shoot-em-up / RPG hybrid game with my friend, called Cosmonator. (The game, not my friend.) We've just released on Steam in Early Access, and we are trying to get as much feedback as possible before we do a full release, including (or especially) from people who are into game dev - so if anyone here wants to check it out feel free! There is a free fully playable demo on https://bourbontank.itch.io/cosmonator, and the link to our Steam page is http://store.steampowered.com/app/656740/Cosmonator/.




(The game is really awesome by the way. Classic old school shmup bullet hellish action, but infused with a deep RPG style progression system - tons of abilities, upgrades, spells, weapons; hordes of different enemies, and epic boss battles. I've assembled a few random screenshots and action gifs here for your viewing pleasure. Please check it out and leave some feedback!)

[AgileMaster]

Ixmucane - I'm only getting back to you here now like months later so you'll probably never see this - but just in case, thanks for the feedback! We did consider all your points and have acted on some of them. So don't think it went unnoticed! It's good to receive critical feedback from someone who is obviously technically experienced. In the meantime, we've been a: greenlit (whoohoo!) and b: we've actually released in Early Access, so if you want to (I'm not sure you were that impressed so maybe you don't care, but maybe you do) you are welcome to check out either our latest updated demo (with some of your points addressed, including importantly the brighter graphics - especially in levels that are not set in outer space, which is most levels) at the same itch site (https://bourbontank.itch.io/cosmonator) - or, of course, if you really want to, we are out now on Steam, so by all means if you are more impressed than last time you can check out the full game. But either way - thanks for the feedback, and sorry for the very late reply!

[AgileMaster]

Thiago - hi! It's been ages, so I don't know if you'll see this either. I've been completely away from forums, too busy with coding etc - we got Greenlight after all, and we've now released on Steam in Early Access. If you don't care to buy it, you can also download the new updated free demo at our itch.io site; this also is much more polished and cooler than the one from before. Let me know how it's going with your game!

(Also, I just wanted to thank you again for your feedback from much earlier; we are very thankful to all the people who got involved during the process of Greenlight - which was a real battle! - and I want to try to get around to thanking everyone! But porbably you'll never end up seeing this. Anyway. Thanks!)
Cheers man

[AgileMaster]

Some more gameplay gifs, showcasing various spells and abilities:

[TheDogCatcher]

Hi,

This game looks nice but I was unable to play it properly as for some reason the fire button also paused the game, I'm using a Saitek 3200 pad.

Maybe having an option to remap the controls would help with this.


edit : I probably should just mention that I was playing the demo version from itch.io.

[TheDogCatcher]

I figured out that I could use the keyboard to play the game, but I'm not keen on using the arrow keys to move it feels awkward to me, probably due to years of using WASD to play games, so this is another thing that I feel having remappable controls would help to fix.

Overall I like that game though, I didn't get too far on my first play - I died on the first swarm level.

I like the sprite design and animations it has a really nice old school feel to it, although I felt some of the sprites looked a bit too dark (background stuff etc.) .

The shop is pretty neat but it kind of breaks up the gameplay a bit, I guess there's nothing you can really do about that though.

I like the way your progress is saved, it's a nice little touch.

All in all it's an interesting game with some cool features, I really wish I could use my control pad with it though.

[AgileMaster]

Hi! Thanks for your feedback! You'll be happy to learn that (due to other feedback also from our first Early Access users) we are working towards implementing key remap for at least the keyboard (many players, it seems, have become too used to WASD!) and possibly also for gamepads. The game plays much more fun on a gamepad obviously so yea - I also wish it worked on your controller! We are just two of us doing this as a side hobby with full time jobs, so unfortunately we don't have as much time as we'd like to address technical issues like all the different kinds of controllers out there. We've kind of managed to work in a few key controllers like XBox etc but hopefully one day we'll get around to incorporating an infrastructure for all different kinds of controllers and even arcade sticks and so on. The Saitek pad looks like it would be a perfect fit for playing the game so if we get around to it I'll see if we can address this somehow and if that happens I'll respond here, if you're still interested.

For the record, if your controller doesn't work on the itch demo version, it probably won't work on the full version either - this is not something that will differ as the fundamental code is the same at this stage.

All that said - I'm really happy you enjoy the game despite that setback! I'd like to think that it means you'd really like it a lot if the controller had worked. And thanks for taking the time to write feedback. Means a lot to us in this Early Access stage. Like I said, if we manage to check on the Saitek issue, you'll be the first to know.

See you later
- Cosmonator

[TheDogCatcher]

I totally understand what it's like to work on a game with limited time/resources and so far it looks like you've done a decent job.

From what I understand my controller should work pretty much like an Xbox 360 one, the movement controls work just fine it's just the fire/pause thing that's an issue, it would be really cool if you could resolve this.

[Ixmucane2]

I tried the new demo, and I noticed that many upgrade costs are unreasonable. For example, most bullet power upgrades are much more expensive than bullet count upgrades for an equivalent DPS increase.

I strongly recommend allowing the player to sell upgrades without losing money: given the scarcity of gems, deciding what to spend the first one for shouldn't be a difficult and blind major irrevocable decision.
Moreover, replacing upgrades at no cost would allow sets of mutually exclusive upgrades (e.g. narrow forward laser OR wide-arc machine gun OR smart guided weapon, like in Raiden) and highly specialized ones (e.g. a shield so good that it stops player bullets too) instead of the current boring increase of firepower and toughness.

Bug: I reached rank 3 before completing the swarm level, and as a consequence the score for that level decreased drastically.

[AgileMaster]

Hi!

I think the problems you are experiencing (and they are typical problems that we have predicted while designing the game) arise from the fact you are approaching the game as an arcade game, a shmup, whereas at heart we intend it to be an RPG style progression game that merely looks and feels like a shmup. It's a really weird concept and we totally predict to lose a lot of potential players like this - like yourself probably - but that is the way we intended it (and luckily we are not here to make a quick buck we wanted to try something new and tricky and unintuitive).

To tackle your points individually, with this in mind: The bullet power and bullet spread upgrades each become individually more expensive as they increase, seeing as they can drastically increase your firepower by stacking together - so obviously only focusing on one of them would make no sense (as they stack). If you only increase bullet power without bullet spread, you will find that it becomes unreasonably priced very soon; if you do the same with shot spread, you will find that one to become unreasonably expensive. As each bullet becomes more powerful with the bullet power upgrade, and the shot spread upgrade gives you more bullets, it's clear that the two upgrades are optimized when they are upgraded side by side. So instead of selling the one that you found to be more expensive, the simple solution in your case would be to buy the other corresponding upgrade, which will then be to the benefit of both these mutually stacking upgrades. (To put it in RPG terms, you can compare the two dimensions to hit rapidity and damage per hit in a traditional RPG.) Maybe that's all very obvious to you; I'm not sure if I took your point correctly, but hopefully that explains that part?

Sticking with the theme of RPG - the cash of the game, again, you can consider as the space shmup version of XP points. Seems totally weird, right? Like a space ship casting spells. But so as you gain XP in RPGs, it becomes harder and harder to gain more XP; the same goes for the cash in Cosmonator - as you gain more ranks you get less and less cash, due to the rank modifier. So when you go back to do levels (including side missions) that you didn't do earlier, depending on how powerful you are, the level will give you less reward. Same as if you went to a previously unexplored area in an RPG when you are strong already: it will be easier for you, but you will get less reward, because now you are higher level. In Cosmonator, the earlier you tackle the side missions, a) the harder they will be for you obviously, because you have less firepower, but b) the more reward you will get. That is not a bug - it is actually one of the fundamental elements of the game. It probably seems really weird if you are considering this in terms of simple one dimensional shmups like Raiden, but again, if you put your mind in the world of RPG progression, it seems much more intuitive. (But yea, I gotta admit, the way we did it is really weird. I don't blame you for finding it disorientating.)

Also, in terms of selling stuff - again, in RPGs, if this was XP, it would seem totally OK not to be able to sell, right? In most RPGs you cannot sell abilities in order to get XP back. Honestly, though, it is something we have considered; at least giving like a 50 percent cash back option or something. At this point I feel like being stuck with something once you buy it feels right with the game, even though I know many people will be frustrated by it.

Have you ever played Dark Souls? I think in order to understand what we are trying to do with Cosmonator, you should think of it not in terms of a perfectly smooth, happy user experience (like many shmups try to do), but a challenging, alienating, mystifying, and slightly frustrating one. I know that's really weird for a shump to try to be. And unfortunately, obviously it will cost us a lot of players, of good reviews, and potential cash in the bank. But more importantly we hope to find the few key players who are into what we're trying to do, and who will appreciate it perhaps you are not in that group (or maybe you are, and you just need some time to get into the vibe! after all, the game really only starts to make sense later on, when all the different complex upgrades and advanced spells start to combine, so the demo is a very limited way to experience it), and that's totally cool. Probably most people will agree with you, alas. In any case I still really appreciate all the time you took with the feedback, and I'm happy you engaged with the game. I would say: stick with it! Buy the full version! But I'm a bit reluctant at this point. There are so many excellent user-friendly shumps out there that I think you will enjoy much more, I just gotta be honest

[AgileMaster]

Hi TheDogCatcher -
just to keep you in the loop - we've udpdated the game in Steam to now have a fire toggle mode option where you can choose to toggle auto fire mode on or off. So you don't have to hold the fire button at all. That should actually fix your controller problem, for the time being, I think? Anyway, we are just doing some more testing and will then incorporate this into the demo as well. Will let you know!

[Ghegs]

Merged the two threads.

[Ixmucane2]

Hi! The bullet power and bullet spread upgrades each become individually more expensive as they increase, seeing as they can drastically increase your firepower by stacking together - so obviously only focusing on one of them would make no sense (as they stack). If you only increase bullet power without bullet spread, you will find that it becomes unreasonably priced very soon; if you do the same with shot spread, you will find that one to become unreasonably expensive. As each bullet becomes more powerful with the bullet power upgrade, and the shot spread upgrade gives you more bullets, it's clear that the two upgrades are optimized when they are upgraded side by side. So instead of selling the one that you found to be more expensive, the simple solution in your case would be to buy the other corresponding upgrade, which will then be to the benefit of both these mutually stacking upgrades. (To put it in RPG terms, you can compare the two dimensions to hit rapidity and damage per hit in a traditional RPG.) Maybe that's all very obvious to you; I'm not sure if I took your point correctly, but hopefully that explains that part?

This is the theory of how stacking upgrades of bullet count and bullet power usually work, and how they should work in your game too. Unfortunately, if going from 4 to 5 bullets per salvo costs 1500 but going from 10 to 11 damage per bullet costs 1300 you are not applying this theory at all.

[AgileMaster]

Actually it costs 1000, not 1300 to upgrade the shot power from 10 to 11 (not sure if this is possibly different in the demo? but I can't think why it would be) - but let me not split hairs; your point is still valid. There is a reason for this discrepancy though. As you build up your character there are ways in which shot power can become more useful independently of shot spread, so it's slightly more costly per DPS on that scale. You can for instance later use the chaingun function which partially overrides shot spread, but uses the same bullets as your normal shot (so your shot power upgrade is still fully relevant). Also later on there are spells like Bullet Fan which shoot a volley of bullets, each doing damage as per your shot power upgrade, but completely unaffected by your shot spread upgrade. But, yea, to your point - if you are building a passive fighter with no spells or special functions, then shot power will seems slightly overpriced; that is until you upgrade the shot spread high enough, at which point you'll want to catch up with your shot power to get a balanced bang for buck situation.

The thing is, since it's all quite transparent in terms of DPS information, and left completely for the player to decide what to buy, I find that little quirky 'imbalances' like this (which you will find all over the game's upgrade system, since there are so many different ways to capitalise on the many different upgrades later as you combine feats and master upgrades) actually make building a character more of an engaging process. Most of it is pretty intuitive, but in some ways it helps if the player quickly takes a moment to look into the mathematics on a very superficial level. I don't want too much of that - it shouldn't become too complicated for the player - and your continued criticism here makes me consider reducing that a bit, to be honest ; but a little bit of that I think keeps you on your toes a bit instead of just buying the first available cheapest upgrade every time, which is what players are encouraged to do in many other more straightforward shoot-em-ups.

Does that make sense? Probably still not. Anyway - thanks for the continued discussion!

[AgileMaster]

(aha! it is indeed different in the demo. we've been rebalancing the dps variables of the main upgrades a while ago, and even the latest demo is still out of date in this regard. In the latest version of the full game the second tier shot power upgrade (10 damage to 11 damage) costs 1000, not 1300; the prices of the shot spread upgrades are also slightly different, so the dps per cash correlates much more closely on every correlating upgrade tier. They are still slightly out of sync, as discussed above, but not at all as much as it is currently in the demo. will update that together with our next total update which is around the corner. I'm still not certain this will make you 100 percent happy, but it's a step in the right direction

PS - to your point, it turns out your observations about this have been 100 percent accurate, thank you