shmups.system11.org

Hello! I'm a one-man dev team who's been working on a bullet hell shooter that should be releasing this winter. It's more of a Touhou-clone than a Darius clone, so the players and enemies are mostly human sized and move around a lot. It's also a boss-rush game, so gameplay jumps directly from one boss to the next, with no drawn-out levels in between. Kind of unconventional choices, I know, but I wanted to focus all my effort into my favorite part of shmup games, which is intricate boss attack patterns.

Here's some gameplay screenshots






If that sounds interesting, check out the trailer here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKUyO2PqPiM
If it sounds really interesting, check out my twitter, for more frequent updates: https://www.twitter.com/GameEvade
Or visit the steam store page to add the game to your wish list: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1265310/Evade/

How does the resource management work? Is it all IL or do things carry over between bosses?
Best of luck.

Thanks!

The game's layout is kinda like a rhythm game (my second favorite genre). Each boss can be challenged independently, and retried as much as you want, kinda like you can with songs in DDR. There's also a loose ordering, to prevent choice paralysis. Most of the bosses are unlocked either by defeating a specific other boss, or a total number of them.

My reasoning was that there's 33 different bosses, and it'd take a few hours to try to defeat them all back-to-back, and if some attack feels unfair, losing 2 hours of progress would feel way worse than losing 3 minutes of progress. Maybe I should put in an endurance mode, for people looking for a more serious challenge.

33 bosses?!. sound like a insane number of bosses, but cool.
it must have been a lot of work to design them.

It was a lot of work, haha. It's pretty tough to get the characters and bullet patterns to all feel unique. Still though, designing bullet patterns is the fun part so it's not that bad.

Hey, I have a playable demo out now for the Steam Game Festival, if anyone wants to try it out. The demo has 6 out of 33 bosses, and probably takes less than an hour to finish, if you have a high skill level. The demo should be a good indication as to whether or not you'll like the full game when it's released.

There's also high score leaderboards through steam. For those interested in bragging rights, there's probably not too much competition right now if you think you can get to #1

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1265310/Evade/

Played it for about an hour, attempted a little bit of scoring (except Corvus). Couple of comments:
- Current sounds are pretty muted and there aren't many of them. A timeout sound would be good, as would a couple of different bullet sounds for different types/bullets redirecting a la the Touhou bell. Doesn't have to be a Touhou-style endless cacophony but some variation would help in making sense of the patterns I think.
- Parts of the UI being on the game field is odd, as is the boss lifebar following the boss around - I guess it's supposed to double as a position indicator. The problem with that is that it's much wider than the boss is, so it doesn't help much. I also died once to bullets overlapping the bomb stock. You've got space on the right side of the screen, can't you put the bombs + lives over there?

Yeah, I can, it's only on the play area as an artifact from early development. Thanks so much for the feedback.

I'll work on the sounds. The programming around that part is pretty shoddy so I don't think it'll ever be good, but hopefully it can at least be not bad