sandrinus wrote:- Turn mechanics is becoming a recorrent point of discussion... I would want to ask of S20-TBL to pls play the whole demo and give his toughts again (specially after fighting the bosses)... but nonetheless...it will be revised to cause less confusion. I'll talk to the team to at least test the Side Arms aproach and/or letting the player fly at their own pace. But since the feature is not breaking the game I'll probably push it for a time after the other features are developed.
I've played the game past the first boss now. The game really just feels strange with the autoscroll and turn combination you used. I'm all for branching paths and exploration to a certain degree (one reason why
Blast Wind feels so much like wasted potential in my book), but I'm with eezbrogi on his suggestion:
eebrozgi wrote:I did not quite "get" the turnaround button. I would suggest maybe only slowing down the screen scrolling when the player turns around, or that's what I thought in my confusion about that feature until I found out later on that backtracking was encouraged/required. Assuming this is a thing you want to keep, maybe it would work better to remove autoscrolling entirely and let the player fly around at their own pace?
The autoscrolling just slows the backtracking down to a crawl, especially with the section in stage 2 that required you to hit a series of switches. I'd rather just fly over to the spots myself and start completing the objectives instead of waiting for the autoscroll to take me where I want to go; enemy respawns or no, it just makes the whole process slower than it could comfortably be.
Taking out autoscrolling while maintaining the ability to freely fly around and explore would greatly speed things up, because it would let the player control the pacing of the game instead of letting autoscroll do it for him. Check out Irem's
Mr. Heli: Battle Chopper (Mr. Heli's Big Adventure) for an example of how this would work. In fact, using this method would allow you to maintain the control scheme you now have and only modify it to do the following:
- Button 1 is Regular Autofire, can turn while firing
- Button 2 is Aim Locked Autofire, which locks you in one direction while firing but can still fly around
- Button 3 is the single shot / charge attack
While we're on the subject of powerups: I noticed that after the first boss, I'm taken directly to Stage 2 with no way of getting to a shop to spend all my cash because frankly, the default shot feels so underpowered especially with all those hummingbirds and pterodactyls flying around. When I attempted to go back to the Map Screen thinking that I needed to do that to buy powerups, I lost all my gold (d'oh). Is there a way to get to a shop in mid-game, or at least get powerups that don't require spending money? (see Capcom's
Forgotten Worlds for an example of how both regular powerup items AND a mid-level item shop are used)
sandrinus wrote:- Will talk with the artist to see what we can do about it... (to tell the truth...it was the first time someone mentioned this...) everything that is interactable has a black outline... will do further tests on it...Thanks!
No problem.
I only mention it because I made the same mistake initially in my own game. Try looking at
how Metal Slug handles enemy projectiles. The first game is probably the cleanest example (later games tend to add a lot of fluff), but you can see how most enemy projectiles--grenades, bullets and tank shells--usually flash orange and blue very rapidly to tell you that it's something you
really want to avoid.
Finally, my last suggestion:
Ebbo wrote:And while I remember this, is there some way to skip dialogue?
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but first we gathered some money ahhah Thanks for the best wishes!
I like the theme, too, it's not something you see too much of in shmups. Consider my interest piqued.
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