Don Yoku Available on Steam

[DoomsDave]

Can you at least delete that guy's irrelevant posts. They add nothing to the discussion and might discourage the dev(or other devs lurking) from posting again if they see some random derailing their thread with garbage hate. People here are clearly interested in the game.

[cave hermit]

I apologize, I got a bit carried away.

Already edited out my posts, although they still need to be deleted by an admin.

[Immryr]

I think Dave was talking about pretas.

[Squire Grooktook]

Feel free to delete this if it's bad, but I thought this was relevant shmups forum discussion.

Without their distinctive, immersive and sometimes inimitable visuals, characters, world settings, audio, and stage designs (not just in how the stages are constructed but how they flow into each other), CAVE's games would be only average. If Deathsmiles had the limited production values of the original Cotton though somehow played exactly the same, I would consider it just okay, but as it stands it's my favorite horizontal STG ever.]

Yeah, style over substance. Exactly why most of the games Cave made in the second half of its life are dull as hell. Playing Akai Katana was amazing, felt like a generic "my first danmaku" style doujin production design-wise with a mediocre layer of pre-rendered paint slapped on top.

Of course, I'm sure that makes me an "autist" or something if I play and judge a damn STG primarily for the gameplay. But fuck, I'm not going to replay a game time and time again or devote 100 hours of my life to 1cc'ing, 2-alling, or generally scoring well at it if it doesn't do a few simple things for me on the gameplay level (which only Cave's best games do, and even those don't totally agree with my tastes). I'd rather just watch a video of it if the aesthetics are so good but I don't really like the gameplay.

I actually agree that the dearth of indie/doujin danmaku games are a bit yawn inspiring, but more because I'd like to see more games that are Irem or Treasure influenced mechanically.

[cave hermit]

I think Dave was talking about pretas.

I know, but I feel that I was maybe being a bit too vitriolic when insulting Pretas.

[Immryr]

Well he brings it on himself to be fair.

[Special World]

From the batch of Cave games that I consider my favorites, I'd say Deathsmiles actually has the weakest visual design. Very weird pre-rendering, and while I love the theme, the Halloween theme is kind of hokey in that game instead of truly cool. I'd take the clean/cartoon style of Dodonpachi or the visual overload of Futari any day.

And I don't think the visual design of this game looks too bad. There are a lot of indie shooters that go for a really garish, sketchy style, and that ends up really obscuring the onscreen action imo. From what I'm seeing in videos, this looks like a pretty clean presentation, even if it's a little bit rough in terms of transitions. No, we can't all be Cave, or Hudson, or whatever. But from where I'm sitting this doesn't look bad.

[Despatche]

i feel ashamed that estebang is actually right for once

squire could not be more wrong about akai katana and i don't exactly care for that game

like this fucking community has absolutely no metric for a "mediocre" game, and that's inexcusable

[Pretas]

but more because I'd like to see more games that are Irem or Treasure influenced mechanically.

There's about a BAZILLION of them to pick from already, and they're hardly underrepresented among your beloved indie games. How many more do you need?!

Irem: Like every other euroshmup ever made, along with more than a few Japanese examples like Last Resort/Pulstar/Rezon. And I don't just mean R-Type - Blood Money is a poor ripoff of Mr. Heli no Daibouken, for example.

Treasure: Like every STG (and a few games in other genres) ever made by indie hipsters who creamed their pants from the "artistic profundity" when they saw Ikaruga. Also Chaos Field.

like this fucking community has absolutely no metric for a "mediocre" game, and that's inexcusable

This is the only refutation I really need against everything else said.

[Squire Grooktook]

but more because I'd like to see more games that are Irem or Treasure influenced mechanically.

There's about a BAZILLION of them to pick from already, and they're hardly underrepresented among your beloved indie games. How many more do you need?!

Irem: Like every other euroshmup ever made, along with more than a few Japanese examples like Last Resort/Pulstar/Rezon. And I don't just mean R-Type - Blood Money is a poor ripoff of Mr. Heli no Daibouken, for example.
Treasure: Like every STG (and a few games in other genres) ever made by indie hipsters who creamed their pants from the "artistic profundity" when they saw Ikaruga. Also Chaos Field.

Nothing that can be described as "euroshmup" even remotely qualifies as Irem or Treasure-like/influenced. You might as well say some damage sponge inertia-laden bullshit is Cave/Touhou influenced because it throws tons of shit on screen, even if you can't actually dodge most of it. Last I checked, most Irem shmups didn't have lifebars or mandatory damage, and although Treasure's length for RSG and Gradius V might be close to Euroshmup conventions, that's where the similarities end.

I am also referring purely to the modern doujin/indie scene, so Chaos Field and Pulstar are not relevant. Neither is anything that doesn't strictly count as an arcade style STG, so lengthy Euroshmups and non-single sitting based games are also out. Rezon counts I guess.

Only quality stg's with those styles I can think of in the indie/doujin scene are some of Edelweiss's games, Astro Ports games, and maybe Piccorinne Soft? I guess Hellsinker could be counted as Treasure/Raizing influenced in some ways. Maybe Triangle Service counts too, but I don't think they can be called "doujin" any more than Qute currently can. I'm sure there are more that I haven't heard of, but from what I can tell, the vast majority of doujin shmups are standard danmaku material.

What I dislike in the indie/doujin scene is that the vast majority of quality titles are standard shot/focus micrododging action, only mechanically distinguished by their scoring mechanitcs and whatever one extra weapon system or whatever is tied into it. Some of them have funner patterns then others, and those are the ones I tend to gravitate towards a bit, but sometimes I feel bored of the sub-genre when most games in it have extremely similar dodging/shooting style.

]
squire could not be more wrong about akai katana and i don't exactly care for that game

like this fucking community has absolutely no metric for a "mediocre" game, and that's inexcusable

Okay, I exaggerated to make a point. I apologize and must now backpedal a bit.

Akai (or at least Slash) is a decent/good game, maybe even really great depending on what you're into. It's got scoring depth, something that Cave excels at. And patterns/level design are mostly subjective (see italicized), though I personally found them dull, lifeless, and a good example of everything I personally don't like in danmaku games. If I ever need an example of what I don't like and don't want to play in a shmup, I can probably point to most of Akai Katana and say "pretty much that". Scoring depth also doesn't matter a bit to me if I don't really really like playing the game on a fundamental level to begin with.

I like some of Cave's games, though even my favorites from their library aren't among my favorite shmups ever. But games are mostly subjective/a matter of taste, so even if I don't like some of them, I'm not going to run around declaring or arguing with people that "Cave's later games had boring patterns" because I realize that what I don't like about them doesn't make them bad for others.

[awry]

While at it, I am really pissed off at the Danmaku Unlimited dev who deserted the forums as soon as the game got released. I still utter a few nasty words every time I have to reconfigure the game resolution on launch.

I actually sent an email to him a year ago, asking him to fix the silly resolution issue I was encountering (refuses to scale most resolutions to my 1680x1050 monitor even though every other game scales just fine, forcing me to use a very low resolution).

No reply. Interesting to hear that he went silent here too.

[Skykid]

Without their distinctive, immersive and sometimes inimitable visuals, characters, world settings, audio, and stage designs (not just in how the stages are constructed but how they flow into each other), CAVE's games would be only average. If Deathsmiles had the limited production values of the original Cotton though somehow played exactly the same, I would consider it just okay, but as it stands it's my favorite horizontal STG ever.

Well Deathsmiles looks like shit and it's probably the weakest of Cave's entire library, so if we're basing your opinion of it against all of your other related comments about other people's games, they suddenly hold very little weight.

That being the case you obviously possess no metric for mediocrity.

I don't know if an independent game's developer once molested you Estebang, but I think it's time to let bygones be bygones and give the guys a break.

We have no shmup scene anymore. If these guys don't get a shot at it we'll really have nothing. The worst of it is, you damn all these games without ever having played them.

I don't want anyone to think you have some clairvoyant ability to see crap when presented with it either, so I'll just remind the entire community you did and said the same things about Resogun.

[Squire Grooktook]

I don't want anyone to think you have some clairvoyant ability to see crap when presented with it either, so I'll just remind the entire community you did and said the same things about Resogun.

Or you could just link to the post where he says that Crimzon Clover WI is much worse than "even the weakest Cave games", including Death Smile X2, because X2 has a more interesting world.

We're all entitled to our tastes in games, but it's best not to pass off things like the above as fact.

[iron chin]

Dear Friends,
I'm just passing by to tell you that Don'Yoku is now on Itch.io as well. Soon MAC and LINUX versions will be available.

To Pretas:
Although mommy told me not to feed the trolls, I just have a request; As you seem to know a lot about arts, programming and music, not to mention your understanding of marketing and shmups history, if you tell me you can do the following:

Design game mechanics, story and characters
Program the game without help,
Create all art assets in a appealing style but fast enough not to hinder the rest of the production,
Pick the right music for the game, make someone compose it and play it without money investment,
Do community management, social networking, marketing,
Create and run a website for the game, with a presskit and feed a constant flow of news,
Run an open beta with 25 testers,
keep contact with the press, have the game previewed by several online magazines around the world,
Have a distribution contract signed, in Japan, even before starting the greenlight campaign,
Run a greenglight campaign and get out of it in UNDER a week,
Get your game running with steam SDK in less than 10 days,
Localize the game to Japanese only with community help,
Do all the above in under 5 month,
Do it ALONE
AND do a game at CAVE standards!
You are hired on the spot!
Or better I'm sure any game company will pay any sum of money for your awesome skills.

Otherwise, please remember, this is an HUMBLE indie game, a love letter to a kind of games we all love.
Probably I could had pumped huge sums of money into a bigger production, with lot of artist creating fabulous assets, musicians playing live in a recording studio, dozens of programmers doing C# magic on a flawless code, but then, dear potential customer, the game should had been sold to 60 bucks or more. Also, having invested so much in the game, I shouldn't risk selling and distributing in a market so picky about shmups as Western one. I should simply sell in Japan and Korea where I have more chances of getting some profit.
Sadly marketing, money and jobs are often far from our true desires, but we have to adapt and play along...

Finally don't be so posh about games, they are just that; games
You are missing a lot of fun you can have with humble indie productions. they could last not as long as great Cave titles, but a week or two of fun for 10 bucks is a good bargain. A lot of passion and dedication goes into Indie games, concede them, at least, that, and they cost as much as a couple McBurgers made under 5 minutes and guzzled in under 30 seconds.
Regards, you are a wonderful, if not a little crazy, community
~ºvº~

[Squire Grooktook]

Regards, you are a wonderful, if not a little crazy, community
~ºvº~

In my experience, most people here are very mature, friendly, and reasonable. Don't be scared off, this place is great, and I'm sure you can get some great feedback for your game if you stick around.

[Skykid]

I don't want anyone to think you have some clairvoyant ability to see crap when presented with it either, so I'll just remind the entire community you did and said the same things about Resogun.

Or you could just link to the post where he says that Crimzon Clover WI is much worse than "even the weakest Cave games", including Death Smile X2, because X2 has a more interesting world.

That shit's borderline weeaboo.

[Weak Boson]

Regards, you are a wonderful, if not a little crazy, community
~ºvº~

In my experience, most people here are very mature, friendly, and reasonable. Don't be scared off, this place is great, and I'm sure you can get some great feedback for your game if you stick around.

Yes! An entrenched troll can really kick up a fuss and derail a thread. This thread is case in point. We should know better.

I came here hoping to see discussion about a cool looking game with an excellent array of moustaches. All this discussion about why every shmup ever is terrible could be interesting, but it's getting in the way.

Hoping to see more footage!

[Special World]

I don't want anyone to think you have some clairvoyant ability to see crap when presented with it either, so I'll just remind the entire community you did and said the same things about Resogun.

Or you could just link to the post where he says that Crimzon Clover WI is much worse than "even the weakest Cave games", including Death Smile X2, because X2 has a more interesting world.

We're all entitled to our tastes in games, but it's best not to pass off things like the above as fact.

DeathSmiles X2 is awesome though. The graphics are more than a bit butt, but the scoring system is fun, the music is *awesome*, the bosses are more interesting than Cave's standard fare, and there are a metric fuckton of bullets onscreen at once. Game gets a bad rap because of its terrible graphics, but it's actually quite good.

[Skykid]

DeathSmiles X2 is awesome though. The graphics are more than a bit butt, but the scoring system is fun, the music is *awesome*, the bosses are more interesting than Cave's standard fare, and there are a metric fuckton of bullets onscreen at once. Game gets a bad rap because of its terrible graphics, but it's actually quite good.

It's arguably better than Deathsmiles in many ways. But it ain't no Akai Katana.

To Pretas:
Although mommy told me not to feed the trolls, I just have a request; As you seem to know a lot about arts, programming and music, not to mention your understanding of marketing and shmups history, if you tell me you can do the following:

Design game mechanics, story and characters
Program the game without help,
Create all art assets in a appealing style but fast enough not to hinder the rest of the production,
Pick the right music for the game, make someone compose it and play it without money investment,
Do community management, social networking, marketing,
Create and run a website for the game, with a presskit and feed a constant flow of news,
Run an open beta with 25 testers,
keep contact with the press, have the game previewed by several online magazines around the world,
Have a distribution contract signed, in Japan, even before starting the greenlight campaign,
Run a greenglight campaign and get out of it in UNDER a week,
Get your game running with steam SDK in less than 10 days,
Localize the game to Japanese only with community help,
Do all the above in under 5 month,
Do it ALONE
AND do a game at CAVE standards!
You are hired on the spot!
Or better I'm sure any game company will pay any sum of money for your awesome skills.

HA!

But can you:

Regularly post on an internet forum where everything you say is a wild prediction about the future of said developer X, delivered as fact, that absolutely never comes to pass,
Refer to the motivations of Japanese developer's actions in a completely factual manner despite having absolutely no inside knowledge of the company,
Condemn absolutely everything made by independent developers without having even looking at the screenshots, let alone ever having played the games in question,
Make lamentable faux pas about some of the best new shmups in recent years because Yotsubane and Housemarque don't have a large team or budget,
State that aesthetic taste is more relevant to the value of a shmup than its actual playable components, and then infer Deathsmiles looks good in the same sentence,
Create four different forum accounts pretending to be different people, yet replicate the characteristics listed above so perfectly that everyone always know you're the same guy?

I THINK NOT!



BTW your game looks pretty cool and I like the Flying Shark meets Cave dynamic, but why you no OS X? ;_;

[Special World]

I maybe like it more than Akai Katana because AK has seriously the worst bosses of any Cave game. I just can't stand em. Slow and plodding, with very sterile bullet patterns. Rest of the game is ace though.

[n0rtygames]

This looks really nice!

Will try to remember to give this a go after coffee

[pestro87]

I bought this yesterday and came on here hoping to see some discussion about the gameplay and scoring mechanics... :/

Here are my initial thoughts:

The good:
- Fun scoring mechanics - you want to laser popcorns for coins, use your weak shot on the larger enemies to build up bombs that you can use to cancel bullets for coins and then finish off the larger enemies with a laser for more coins
- Nice aesthetics and art-style

The bad:
- Framerate issues. It always seem to stutter at the beginning of each stage and it got pretty bad during the Stage 4 boss...
- The bullet patterns could be more inspiring imo
- I didn't notice any destructible parts on the bosses or anything else that makes them feel a bit more dynamic

Overall I wouldn't mind putting some more time into it but unfortunately the framerate issues really hinders my enjoyment of the game.

[iron chin]

The bad:
- Framerate issues. It always seem to stutter at the beginning of each stage and it got pretty bad during the Stage 4 boss...
- The bullet patterns could be more inspiring imo
- I didn't notice any destructible parts on the bosses or anything else that makes them feel a bit more dynamic

Overall I wouldn't mind putting some more time into it but unfortunately the framerate issues really hinders my enjoyment of the game.

Framerate issues are uncommon, I've tested the game with 25 persons and potential framerate issues had been averted. I'm looking into it right now but it seems some sort of local config problem, sorry for silly questions but:
Had you updated your graphic card drivers?
Are your pc specifications above minimum requirements?
The game's html5 and runs smoothly on pretty much any machine I've tested it, even on 8 years old laptop running Vista it does not stutter. There's a single frame skip on first stage when you kill first pop corn, due to the way the engine loads the sounds assets but then it should go fine all the way to the final boss.
Had you changed some configuration of Chrome, disabled some plug in for example? Node Webkit, the html5 wrapper, needs web GL and you or a program could had disabled it on Chrome.
Without WebGl the game runs very badly.
So far I can only think of this as the cause, please look into it and let me know, no other users had any significant framerate issue so far, I'd like to solve it as soon as possible.
You can contact me with a PM in these forums, by mail at ironchinaviator[at]gmail.com, in the website donyoku.com , tab 'ask us anything', or in steam's game community page.
I'll post an update as soon as I pin point the problem and find a solution.
Thanks for telling me about it.
~ºvº~

[n0rtygames]

Dozens of programmers doing C# magic on a flawless code

Out of interest, why is C# considered some hardcore voodoo? I mean it really is very simple and frankly to be perfectly honest other than being a stepping stone on to other things or having to use it because that's what the platform you're targetting uses... It's a bit poo really

[iron chin]

Dozens of programmers doing C# magic on a flawless code

Out of interest, why is C# considered some hardcore voodoo? I mean it really is very simple and frankly to be perfectly honest other than being a stepping stone on to other things or having to use it because that's what the platform you're targetting uses... It's a bit poo really

Really It was just an example, no meaning behind it. I've worked on two other previous games integrally in C#, with two other programmers (I'm no programmer myself), and never had any problems. The only real problem is labour laws in EU, but that's another story ^^

[system11]

I have some observations after buying the game:

Your control config menu/system really, REALLY needs fixing. I can't use awsd and initially I couldn't even work out why none of the menus worked until I prodded each key on the keyboard. Having worked that out and finding the a/b buttons, I tried to reconfigure the controls. It's possible to re-assign keys which clash or overwrite but also take effect as soon as you reach the b button, meaning it's possible to totally break the game. Right now, I have no down control at all, so I can't even operate the menus anymore.

Uninstalling and reinstalling the game made no difference.

1) You need a confirm step in the controls
2) While arrow keys seemed to be detected during setting, nothing was shown next to the control for them
3) It shouldn't be possible to confirm without all controls being set and no clashes
4) Single digital joypads don't seem to work (buttons do, but no directions)
5) Where is the config data stored so I can clear it?

[pestro87]

I had the exact same issue actually. I managed to revert back the controls by deleting the contents of C:\Users\$USERNAME\AppData\Local\Don-Yoku-1.0.0.3JPSteam

@iron chin Thank you very much for the reply! My bad, turns out that Steam decided to use my Integrated graphics card (which didn't have the latest driver) instead of my nvidia one (that I have specified to use as default in the global settings)

[system11]

Thanks for that, played it now.

Extra observations - boss name at the bottom of the screen is a problem because if the player is down there they can't see their own hitbox with the text overlaying that and bullets. Sound seems to be overloading a bit - perhaps on purpose but honestly it sounds distorted like a blown speaker when explosions happen. There seem to be 0 pixels of grace on the hitbox to bullet edges, and several times I thought a dodge should work and it didn't. I'd suggest making the hitbox marker a tiny bit bigger while not changing the actual size since that would be easier than trying to give a grace outline on the bullets. Get one big massive frame drop at the start of every mission, other than that it's just mild and occasional.

[iron chin]

I have some observations after buying the game:

Your control config menu/system really, REALLY needs fixing. I can't use awsd and initially I couldn't even work out why none of the menus worked until I prodded each key on the keyboard. Having worked that out and finding the a/b buttons, I tried to reconfigure the controls. It's possible to re-assign keys which clash or overwrite but also take effect as soon as you reach the b button, meaning it's possible to totally break the game. Right now, I have no down control at all, so I can't even operate the menus anymore.

Uninstalling and reinstalling the game made no difference.

1) You need a confirm step in the controls
2) While arrow keys seemed to be detected during setting, nothing was shown next to the control for them
3) It shouldn't be possible to confirm without all controls being set and no clashes
4) Single digital joypads don't seem to work (buttons do, but no directions)
5) Where is the config data stored so I can clear it?

By default you can use wsad for movement and BNM as A, B and C buttons respectively. Also joystick is supported by default in menus. To use either keyboard or joystick/pad in game you have to select the correspondent in the dip switches menu.
Usually there shouldn't be any clashes as assigning a key delete the previous binding. Once selected the key can be confirmed, with your newly assigned A button (not keyboard A but whatever you picked to be A button), or cancelled with B button (as above). You cannot confirm or cancel without all controls being set as they are sequential.
All xcontrol compatible hardware is compatible (Xbox compatible) only Dpad is supported as analogic had some issues on certain machines (I'm working on a solution)
Data is stored at: C:\Users\$USERNAME\AppData\Local\Don-Yoku-1.0.0.3JPSteam or hitting the 'reset memory' option in dip switches will reset everything (careful it resets high scores as well).

Hope had been of some help, I agree the dip switches menu need some clarification, I will probably revamp it on first mayor free update planned for September.
~ºvº~

BTW. I hope my previous comment about the music didn't come off as too venomous. It is just that the compositions are so awesome the recording quality doesn't do them justice. Anyway, hope to see an even better game from you later.

No offence taken, considering the means we had to make the game we are more than happy with what we achieved. Actually the OST had been recorded at higher quality but the actual dimension is bigger than the game's. To import the tracks into the html5 wrapper we had to save them at a lower quality. Antonio S. and I we are working on a down sampling solution with better results, future projects will have surely a better audio output. (A bit of tech stuff; Construct2 works with .ogg files, which use, in my opinion, a weird compression algorithm I'm still struggling to cope with).
~ºvº~

I had the exact same issue actually. I managed to revert back the controls by deleting the contents of C:\Users\$USERNAME\AppData\Local\Don-Yoku-1.0.0.3JPSteam

@iron chin Thank you very much for the reply! My bad, turns out that Steam decided to use my Integrated graphics card (which didn't have the latest driver) instead of my nvidia one (that I have specified to use as default in the global settings)

For the key issue see above, and regarding your framerate I let loose a big breath of relief! You made me worry hahaha
~ºvº~

[iron chin]

Thanks for that, played it now.

Extra observations - boss name at the bottom of the screen is a problem because if the player is down there they can't see their own hitbox with the text overlaying that and bullets. Sound seems to be overloading a bit - perhaps on purpose but honestly it sounds distorted like a blown speaker when explosions happen. There seem to be 0 pixels of grace on the hitbox to bullet edges, and several times I thought a dodge should work and it didn't. I'd suggest making the hitbox marker a tiny bit bigger while not changing the actual size since that would be easier than trying to give a grace outline on the bullets. Get one big massive frame drop at the start of every mission, other than that it's just mild and occasional.

? no text in game overlays bullets or player, could you send a screenshot of what you mean please, and I'll look into it immediately.

Different hitbox marker sizes had been tested and this one is the most voted, but I could consider putting an option in the menu to change it size.

Frame drops are not normal, please check your drivers, video card, chrome config (check if you have WEB GL installed) check Presto87's post regarding his framerate issue.