Stellar Fury - A Classic Shoot 'Em Up

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Lethe
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Re: Stellar Fury - A Classic Shoot 'Em Up

Post by Lethe »

bk_figames wrote:Control remapping shouldn't change UI. UI uses a seperate action map that is not assignable. This is by design as it will prevent players from inadvertently making the UI non functional. I.e. they could remove key maps and then not be able to move around the menu. Did you have issues with the UI controls and that's why you went into remapping?
Yeah, I see where you're coming from. It was just a bit jarring having to use space and enter when I had already set up different buttons.
bk_figames wrote:Not sure what you mean by the "4 way shot"
The double focus is what I meant by the 4-way thing. You essentially have 4 shots and 4 speeds (even though two of the speeds are the same).

i.e for Tempest:
Unfocus shot: Fast speed, forward + wide side shot
Focus shot: Slow speed, forward shot only (weaker than unfocused)
Unfocus laser: Slow speed (slightly more delay than using focus button), laser + wide side shot
Focus laser: Slowest speed, laser + narrow side shot

I don't have a problem with it on principle (I play plenty of games with more complicated controls), but I feel like it's currently adding more fiddliness than it's contributing. And like I said before, personally I think the shot/missile dynamic is more interesting than the shot/laser one anyway, so I'd prefer to be thinking about that than which 3 button combo I have held down.

The way a different game, StellaVanity, handles this is by giving you different binds for 1. shot/laser (Cave style), 2. autofire shot, 3. dedicated laser + focus, 4. shooting agnostic focus, and then letting you double-bind them if you want. It only has two speeds though and they always behave the same.

Related suggestion for the Cobra. The horizontal side shot narrows towards the center as you transition to laser. As soon as you hit focus it disappears, and as soon as you let go of focus or laser it snaps back to the widest position. Wouldn't it be better for the side shot to travel back to wide gradually just like it narrows? That way you could control the shot width by "riding" the laser/focus at different speeds.
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Verticen
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Re: Stellar Fury - A Classic Shoot 'Em Up

Post by Verticen »

I really like what you have here. Your design looks great. However, I think that the sprites of the player and enemies need to be about 2x as bright as they currently are. They are very hard to see against the dark background. They become even harder to see with how bright your ‘glowing’ effects of lasers, bullets, thrusters are, and their bloom effects. I get that there’s little light in real space, but I think a small bump in value goes a long way here.
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It becomes much easier to visually pick out the player from the playfeild. This will also enhance the color and details in the spritework of the ships.
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Don’t get me wrong, your visuals are good. You’ve got gold in your hands; make it glitter and shine.
(but don’t overdo it, the game looks good kinda dark and moody)
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I’m going to give the demo a shot sometime. This looks game like it could turn out very good; I’ll be waiting for release day.
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Joel
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Re: Stellar Fury - A Classic Shoot 'Em Up

Post by Joel »

Just caught up with this thread (new to the forums) - can I say that your glow and laser effects look absolutely fantastic? You have some really good contrast going on as well.
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bk_figames
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Re: Stellar Fury - A Classic Shoot 'Em Up

Post by bk_figames »

Hmm - so I didn't see the posts on this forum (usually it emails me).

@Lethe
I just release Alpha 0.2 which incorporates significant changes to the Unfocused/Focused/Double-Focus
Double focus is more of a special now with a meter and more powerful abilities. The old double focus power is now the regular focus.

@Vertican
Man, gotta update the images on this forum. Those screenshots are actually almost a year old. Glowing bullets are long gone. Honestly, the purple ship hasn't been in the game for a minute - I'll bring it back in at some point and yeah you're right - prob could be made easier to read in your peripheral vision. I've been refining the players abilities as I go along and those refinements have gotten applied to less and less of the ships. Once I finalize (or get a lot closer) the player abilities I'll rework the other ships. Right now the latest demo only has the Tempest in it.


Alpha 0.2 Demo:
https://figamesllc.itch.io/stellar-fury ... 02-release
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bk_figames
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Re: Stellar Fury - A Classic Shoot 'Em Up

Post by bk_figames »

Last couple weeks been focusing on the changes that will be in our next demo update. These are mostly bug fixes and quality of life improvements.

Bullet Visibility:
Changed bullet assets to improve overall visibility. Been a long time coming and I've put it off long as I could but I changed the bullet graphics to be more visible. I leverage both light/dark as well as color contrast to make them more easily readable from the players peripheral vision. I added a style option to the bullet config panel and the previous bullet style can be enabled if desired

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Expanded Graphics Options:
I've been expanding the amount of graphic options that are available.
  • [li]Bloom settings can be enabled/disabled per item as well as now having an option to adjust the overall intensity[/li]
    [li]Explosion/debris size can now be adjusted as well as debris amount[/li]
    [li]Death explosion flashes and bomb flashes can now be turned off[/li]
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Practice Mode:
I've begun implementing a practice mode. This is where the player can attempt any section of any level or any boss/midboss:
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Beyond this there are a number of bug fixes and optimizations. I significantly cleaned up some of the object pooling to improve load times and decrease memory usage.
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Lethe
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Re: Stellar Fury - A Classic Shoot 'Em Up

Post by Lethe »

I like these gameplay changes a lot. Good stuff.

Don't know if these have been caught or not so I'll mention them:
- Restarting from the pause menu doesn't re-initialize rank or the item/extend counter.
- It's possible to bug the special charge bar by depleting the double-focus capacitor from less than a full bar, allowing the special to be used while the capacitor is recharging. The special won't do anything in this state, but becomes "stored" and automatically activates at no cost when the capacitor fills up.
- The deadzones at the edges of the screen which are partially covered up by the UI block the player from moving into them, but not items, which can be disorienting (bombs drifting off and on screen etc).

Some Unity games support exclusive fullscreen mode with true resolution control. Have you considered looking into this? I have no idea how practical it would be to implement.
bk_figames
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Re: Stellar Fury - A Classic Shoot 'Em Up

Post by bk_figames »

Hey - thanks for the feedback - seems like it comes from some more thorough playtesting... seriously, appreciate it!

I'm working on getting the next batch of updates out the door (prob will release shortly after new years) - I try to include a few big changes and a bunch of tweaks and bug fixes. The rank not resetting is definitely something I noticed and should already be fixed in the next update. The item pickup leaving the screen temporarily - good observation. I adjusted the parameter so it remains on screen. As a dev, I know that it times out and stops bouncing after a period of time but a new player won't know this and might think it's gone for good before reappearing.

As for the double-focus special - gotta look into that - honestly though, knowing how I coded it -the situation you described seems possible - prob had something to do with the flag being set to evoke the weapon even though it doesn't have charge that gets saved and executed once it has charge.

Edit: not sure what you mean by "full screen" and "true resolution". Got a link?

Second Edit: Figured out what's going on. The double-focus special charges even though double-focus is depleted and it will show the light flash but it doesn't actually fire.Should be fixed by next update.
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Lethe
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Re: Stellar Fury - A Classic Shoot 'Em Up

Post by Lethe »

Unity's default fullscreen is a borderless windowed mode i.e. a window masquerading as fullscreen (referred to as "fullscreen window" internally). Because it's a window this mode is unable to, for example, change the display resolution - selecting a lower resolution will still render at your desktop resolution, just with a game that's been upscaled. It's also subject to whatever else the Windows desktop manager decides to do with it. See this article. The command line launch options don't currently work with Stellar Fury - the game may be overriding it by forcing its default mode on startup or something like that.
bk_figames
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Re: Stellar Fury - A Classic Shoot 'Em Up

Post by bk_figames »

Hey - thanks for the info - I will have to look into it!

We've got an update to our alpha demo - full list of changes described here: https://figamesllc.itch.io/stellar-fury ... 5-released

Video of the gameplay can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6OIgidzSe0
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bk_figames
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Re: Stellar Fury - A Classic Shoot 'Em Up

Post by bk_figames »

Hello,

After quite some time dealing with bug fixes and incorporating feedback from playtesters, I thought it was high time I grind out some new content. I've been working on the level art and enemy design for level 5. I've been trying to give these guys a theme and these ones have a theme of "Geometry" - i.e. bullet patterns have sharp lines and often form shapes.

Giffys below!

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Ark
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Re: Stellar Fury - A Classic Shoot 'Em Up

Post by Ark »

I like the style, game seems to be getting better and better.
bk_figames
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Re: Stellar Fury - A Classic Shoot 'Em Up

Post by bk_figames »

Thank you! Yeah - it's come a long way this past year. Big factor has been feedback I've gotten from the shmup community - both on this forum and the discord servers.
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Verticen
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Re: Stellar Fury - A Classic Shoot 'Em Up

Post by Verticen »

Hey, I was able to give the most recent demo (Alpha 0.25) a try, and wanted to leave some feedback and test info.

Overall I really like the game so far. The pacing and challenge is was really good. I thought that the secondary weapon was a really cool feature that was implemented well once you got the hang of it. It kind of reminded me of the secondary attack gauges in Psikyo games. I think there should be a small audio cue when the secondary gauge is filled to notify the player that a complete attack can be used. I think this would encourage players to get in a rhythm of using the secondary attack right when it is ready, without them having to watch the offscreen gauge and promote aggressive and strategic use of the secondary. In my playthrough, I found I would often forget to effectively manage use of my secondary during tough sections of boss fights, which resulted in me needing to spend more time doing bullet damage to the boss instead of killing it faster with secondary attacks.

At some point before release consider making a quick tutorial that explains all of the the double focus mechanics, I went several games before I even used it, and its a really cool feature with strong scoring/routing potential.

Graphically, I think you have a really solid grungy high-bit art direction. A lot of your enemies are a similar brown/red color. I think that adding a few other colors for different enemy times will help players tell different types of small enemies apart. Even some of the larger enemies, such as the large Quadcopters and Bicopters, look pretty similar, but could look more different if one type was, say, dark cyan.

I really think that the background scrolls too fast during the stage 1 bossfight. The clouds moving as fast as they do add a lot of visual interference and made it harder to read bullets. The issue is that there is too much contrast that rapidly changes when the clouds scroll that fast, resulting in chunks of the screen that are practically flashing black and grey. I think a good solution may be to darken the clouds as part of the boss intro. You can probably just decrease a color value gradually when the boss is loaded (or do something with opacity). Darkening a background for visibility in a bossfight is fairly common effect/mechanic that a lot of classic shmups use. Gun Frontier has a pretty creative way of doing it for its stage 2 boss

I eventually turned off all bloom after awhile.

Also, here’s some technical notes that may help your dev.

I was able to get this running in WINE, which is good; that means it will probably work with Steam's proton, which means your game is probably Steam Deck compatible. I experienced pretty solid performance, but did have some noticeable frame drops around heavy sections. I experienced one crash during stage 2, I don’t have any idea what caused it. Beyond that, I won’t report any bugs that I don’t think are part of the game. The game used about 1.4 GB ram.

I used an arcade stick during my playthrough, but also had a keyboard to help with some menus. With the joystick, I found that a few menu sliders have an issue where they can be increased (→), and I was not able to decrease them, due to the decrease direction (←) moving the highlight over to an option to the right of it. The “Bloom” and “Debris” sections of the graphics menu have this issue. Other than this issue, the arcade stick performed great in menus and games.

Good work, keep it up.
bk_figames
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Re: Stellar Fury - A Classic Shoot 'Em Up

Post by bk_figames »

Hey - thanks for giving the game a go and leaving very thorough and thoughtful feedback. I really appreciate it!

Funny you mention the background - I had an idea that at some point in the level have a lightening flash and the clouds darken and a non-visually disruptive rain effect added. I was just thinking about as visual flair, but it could be a way to darken the background in creative way.

Tutorial/audio cues - absolutely on my list. I've seen people play it before and each time I have to explain the double focus mechanic. Honestly, been waiting until I really iron out all the mechanics and it's more or less final before I make that kind of stuff - else I would have to redo it if it changes.

Tech stuff - good to hear it runs on wine. I was able to reduce memory usage by around 400mb so that optimization will be in the next update. I do use pretty large sprites (apart of that "high bit" aesthetic) which def balloon the mem usage a bit. Hard to get around that without reducing visual quality (which I don't want to do).
By chance - did you notice the framedrops when you were doing a screen clear (either thru bomb or double focus). I've noticed a consistent framedrop if you clear the screen of a lot of bullets. What I think is happening is I have to instantiate new score popup objects because there are so many and if you have to create new objects in memory, you can see a performance hit. What I want to do for those small point items is don't display a popup right away but sum up a bunch together and display 1 popup with the total score. I think this would be better feedback to the player overall and reduce the utilization at these points.


UI stuff in unity is a pain in the ass tbh. Sounds like I prob have some ui nav maps broken somewhere. Think I've noticed these issues around this. Glad to hear your arcade stick is working well. I've tested loads of controllers. I actually ordered 2 more cheaper arcade sticks just to throw more stuff at it. I use a third-party input manager for more extensive controller support - stock Unity input manager controller support is pretty barebones.
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Verticen
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Re: Stellar Fury - A Classic Shoot 'Em Up

Post by Verticen »

I played a bit more to try and find where I had performance drops. I’m testing on a low-mid range laptop and running your game from its internal SSD. Likely, most of your players will be using something with a bit more horsepower, but this helped me identify where performance suffers the most.

Bombs going off didn’t seem to cause that much lag, though there was often a small, short lag spike following a bomb explosion. Idk what causes that, might be collecting a large amount of bullet cancel items that the bomb creates.

The stage 1 section before the helicarrier generally gave me consistent poor performance, though that may just be at high rank when the game is throwing a lot at me. Situations where I had multiple quadcopters and small enemies all shooting could get choppy as well.

There is a very small, but noticeable, bump/framedrop when the player ship respawns. My educated guess is that this is related to the ship being reloaded/initialized to respawn, so I’d see if you can keep some of the ship’s data from being deleted when it dies, and having to be reloaded.

For an audio cue when the secondary gauge is full, I’d say that you could get away with using the menu chirp sound effect as a placeholder for now. You’ll want a sound that wont be jarring to hear dozens of times during a playthrough, so like the menu chirps, it shouldn’t be very loud or long.

I also encountered some new bugs;

When using a joystick or arrow keys, the ‘back’ button in the practice stage select menu will trap your cursor on it. You can just hit it to go back and then return to the menu again, but it's a bug and inconvenience.

Advancing through menus too quickly can cause the wrong thumbnail and description to be displayed for the highlighted menu element. The easiest way to do this is to highlight ‘play’ and rapidly hit accept twice. If performed, ‘veteran’ will be selected, but the thumbnail and description will be for the previous menu element; ‘arcade’. This does not effect what selecting 'arcade' does, and this is negated when the player advances the menu cursor up or down to another difficulty menu element.

Using ‘restart mission’ when using the practice stage select returns you to the start of the stage, instead of where the stage select started you. This isn’t a big deal, but should probably be changed before release.
bk_figames
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Re: Stellar Fury - A Classic Shoot 'Em Up

Post by bk_figames »

Thanks for the extra effort!

Def don't want it to have noticable frame drops, even on a lower powered pc. Most will be that forgiving about these kind of issues.

My first thought is an object pooling issue. All objects are pre-generated in memory at the start of the level. This is all enemies, bullets, bg elements as it can cause performance issues if all this is created on the fly. That being said, if an object pool is depleted, it will create a new one - which you want as a frame drop is better than the game crashing (which is what will happen if it doesn't have an object to create).

Prob need to go disable pool growth and see if the game crashes - like maybe when those quadcopters spray the screen full of bullets. In the 0.25 update I did reduce the number of bullets I'm pooling to improve load time/mem usage- might need to bump some pools up - really about finding that "goldilocks" number where you have just enough of a particular object pooled.
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Re: Stellar Fury - A Classic Shoot 'Em Up

Post by bk_figames »

Hey everyone,

Been a bit since I've posted updates in here - been real busy.

I just released 0.4 the other day which officially moves it into "Beta". While this is really an arbitrary definition, and the game is still very much a work in progress - it has come a long way in the past 6 months

There has been a lot of changes in the past few updates - I'll highlight the big ones


0.3: https://figamesllc.itch.io/stellar-fury ... 03-release
0.3 mostly contained lots of bug fixes and optimizations. It also included a revamp of the difficulty settings



0.35: https://figamesllc.itch.io/stellar-fury ... 35-release
This introduced ultra-wide screen monitor support as well as more bug fixes.
Biggest visual change was that I color shifted half of the red/teal enemies to blue/gold - to add more visual variety and interest.
This version also removed bloom entirely from the game.
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0.4: https://figamesllc.itch.io/stellar-fury ... 04-release
This updated introduced a completely overhauled scoring system, an updated help section and a tutorial mission as well as better audio/visual ques.
Scoring system is now centered around the "double-focus" mechanic. Full details can be found in the change log
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