Super Galaxy Squadron

[Phlakes]

Well first of all, hi, I've been lurking for maybe a year, since I knew basically nothing about the genre outside of horrible flash games I played in middle school and this place is a great resource to learn, so yeah, hi, good to be here, etc.

Anyway, about two years ago I started working on a thing and it was horrible, and earlier this year I went back into it and tried to make it less horrible, or possibly, if I'm lucky, functional and/or actually fun to play.

So several months later, Super Galaxy Squadron exists.



It's on IndieDB

I also have a lonely Twitter where I sometimes talk about it

And here's a short gameplay video

Two big, relatively outdated gifs-

Spoiler

I won't do the whole introduction since that's on the IndieDB page, but it's in space and there are 14 ships to choose from and lots of things to shoot at other ships.

The basic concept of the game a shmup with old-school proclivity, but made accessible for average players.

That comes down to a few key features-

-Elements of randomness (very obvious in the demo since it's endless and all enemies spawn randomly, but beyond that there's still more)
-Health in place of lives(although there's a hardcore mode which removes it)
-Along with that, saves at the beginning of each stage
-Simple, obvious scoring
-Modern additions like grazing and gamepad support
-Purchasable, branching upgrades (which are replaced by regular powerups in endless mode)

Plus other things I'm not thinking of. The point is to make it less about perfecting specific actions and more about general, satisfying bullet shooting, with enough replay value to keep the people who don't care about score or mastery still invested. I know people can be really particular about what makes these games good, and I admit that I'm sacrificing some of those things for the sake of accessibility, but there's another reason why I'm trying to hit a larger audience-

Once the game is out, all proceeds will go to Child's Play, a really cool charity that you might have heard of. If only because of that, I want this to be something that's attractive to any potential player rather than only those who are looking for a challenge.

I'll be Kickstarting it in about a week to be able to afford licensing shenanigans, and also to pay these guys to make music, but before then I'm trying to get it into peak condition so I'll have a decent playable demo out for people to look at.

And since you guys know waaay more about this stuff than I do, I figured I'd run it by you to get some more valuable feedback.

So you can download the most recent build here, but don't tell anyone, it's our secret. For like a week I guess.

It only contains the endless mode since I only have three regular stages functional and none of them are complete. Obviously the enemy spawning is still really rough, at this point I don't have time to polish so it's just in get-the-job-done mode. Aside from general mechanics and balancing, if you run into any bugs that would also be helpful to know. Especially if you're using a Dualshock because I've only been testing with a 360 gamepad.

[Herr Schatten]

It looks lovely and it seems you really have made your homework studying your shmups. Gotta love that Raide Fighters-esque ship selection screen.

When I watched the video, at first glance, though, I mistook the smaller score pickups for suicide bullets and wondered why you dove headfirst into them. Maybe you could make the a little less bullet-shaped? A lot of us shmup players are conditioned to recognize blue and pink dots as bullets intuitively.

[Pteriforever]

As a warning, parts of this post are going to be kind of harsh.

To begin with, score carries over between games and you can't change the controls. I'd also appreciate if there was a focus button, but judginf

-Elements of randomness (very obvious in the demo since it's endless and all enemies spawn randomly, but beyond that there's still more)
-Health in place of lives(although there's a hardcore mode which removes it)
-Along with that, saves at the beginning of each stage
-Simple, obvious scoring
-Modern additions like grazing and gamepad support
-Purchasable, branching upgrades (which are replaced by regular powerups in endless mode)

You just gave a perfect laundry list of everything users of this forum loathe. You say you "want this to be something that's attractive to any potential player rather than only those who are looking for a challenge.", but in all honesty, the average players /are/ the ultra-hardcore people on this forum who are indeed looking for a challenge. "casual shmup players" is an oxymoron; in short, your target audience doesn't exist.

-- Randomness is typically bad design in shmups, especially for scoring players, because it makes consistent, perfected play difficult. This guide, which I suggest reading immediately if you want to salvage this project, explains it better than I can. Unless you're going for some kind of roguelike-hybrid, but that doesn't seem to be your intention.

-- Healthbars are notorious for enabling players to become overly "tanky". If they were mechanically identical to lives, then, sure, that'd be fine, but the current implementation needs like 10 consecutive hits before dying, and that's kind of ridiculous.

-- Nobody will use checkpoints. Generally, players' goal is to beat the entire game with no continues starting from the beginning. I suppose their presence isn't that harmful, but, meh.

-- Ingame shops tend to create an emphasis on long-term strategy, which probably isn't a good idea unless you're going for something like Warblade.

Hmm, now for the good points. The boss has reasonably good patterns, despite being incredibly easy. I like the art, and it's cool that there are lots of different ships. Oh, and the scoring system is nice too.

Good luck, and sorry for being so negative...

[Ebbo]

I'm really impressed by the graphical fidelity of this game. And not only does it look nice, it controls well too. Few things I noticed during the endless mode: pretty much all of the enemies fire fixed patterns only. I think you should mix in some enemies that fire directly aimed bullets at the player. This second thing comes more down to preferences but the power up icons should keep moving instead of simply stopping since sometimes icons simply stayed too high or stopped right in the middle of a large enemy. Or was it intended as a risk-reward mechanism?

It seems you already have a good foundation - all the game now needs is some proper level design and extra polish and you should be good to go.

[Phlakes]

"casual shmup players" is an oxymoron; in short, your target audience doesn't exist.

Actually I'll have to disagree with that, since that's what I am. It may not be an audience, but I think the biggest reason for it is that people are rarely ever exposed to shmups outside of videos and, like with me, horrible flash games, and I know for a fact that a lot of people are turned off by the difficulty and trail-and-error nature of the genre. I feel like if there was some kind of "gateway shmup" that was more comfortable for those people, there would be more casual players (and I don't mean to imply that this is supposed to be that game since no one's going to play it, but the principle is the same).

I mean from what I've seen online and in arcades, there's a decent amount of people that still try them out of curiosity but never really get into them, which is exactly what happened with me until I started needing to play some for research.

-- Randomness is typically bad design in shmups, especially for scoring players, because it makes consistent, perfected play difficult. This guide, which I suggest reading immediately if you want to salvage this project, explains it better than I can. Unless you're going for some kind of roguelike-hybrid, but that doesn't seem to be your intention.

That's true, but that's why perfection isn't the focus of the game. Obviously I can't speak for anyone but myself, but over the several hundred times I've played it while making it, I still don't get bored with it because each run is different (I'll sometimes move on from a game after playing it once or twice because I feel like I've seen everything, since I don't care about mastering it). The only way I can make it work is if the randomness is tuned well enough that it doesn't get in the way, but if I can then it should still be viable to play for score, even if it's not perfect.

This second thing comes more down to preferences but the power up icons should keep moving instead of simply stopping since sometimes icons simply stayed too high or stopped right in the middle of a large enemy. Or was it intended as a risk-reward mechanism?

That's actually something I've been experimenting with, I like that you have to go out of the way to get them, but I think I'll give them a little bit of movement so they don't get stuck in a bad spot.

[n0rtygames]

So you can download the most recent build here, but don't tell anyone, it's our secret. For like a week I guess.

Google drive says:

Sorry, this file is infected with a virus
Only the owner is allowed to download infected files.

:-/

[n0rtygames]

I feel like if there was some kind of "gateway shmup" that was more comfortable for those people, there would be more casual players

This exists. It's called Mushihimesama Futari Black Label Original Mode. Also Crimzon Clover Novice Boost.

The latter won't cost you an arm and a leg and is available on steam.

Also MF even offers a casual counterstop. But that's getting in to weird territory so let's just gloss over that...

[Lord Satori]

^
It doesn't hurt to make another one though. The more gateways into a genre there are, the more popular it will become.

[Ixmucane2]

Played a couple of games of the demo. About 20 minutes for about 11M points with the Amber ship, then I got bored and died.

• Graphics are excellent, both technically and artistically. The Amber ship has very large shots from a ridiculously wide base, which might possibly be improved by making it less wide and/or making it deal extra point-blank damage (coherently with its special weapon theme).
• Recovering the excessive number of blue $ items is a chore. What about attracting them towards the ship? Or making them useful before collection, for example by catching bullets that would hit the player? Currently, they only reward luck (when they can be picked up without getting shot). You could also leave only major score items.
• Where do powerups come from? Don't make them random: even in random levels they could be dropped by enemies of a certain class that appear periodically.
• Large hitbox and "health" are a bad combination. "Strategy" consists in catching cross powerups, which shouldn't be an absolute priority. Make dodging easier and more important.
• How does the "special" bar charge? And wouldn't health deserve a similar display instead of an ugly percentage?
• The provisional endless mode is very repetitive. Use less bosses, more popcorn, and denser formations of medium enemies, and even more importantly make it progressively harder.
• At the end of the game, seeing the score instead of instantly dropping to the ship selection screen would be nice.

[Phlakes]

Well, the game's finally on Kickstarter, plus Steam Greenlight. There's also an updated demo that has a lot of improvements, some taken from this thread even though I've been too busy to reply.