Shmadow - Available on Steam

[rjdunlap]

Hey everyone! We recently released our first title on Steam and wanted to share it with you guys here and get any feedback on the game.



Shmadow is a horizontal twin stick shooter, you play as a ball of light lighting up the darkness that over takes the screen and various bosses.

List of features:
- Endless gameplay, the game runs infinitely with increasing difficulty
- 9 Bosses with their own unique ability and way to kill you; ranging from speeding up the game to exploding into a bunch of minions on death
- 8 Dynamic Tracks created by Bobby Rose (http://bobbyrose.bandcamp.com/album/shmadow), we change the music based on difficulty
- 3 Different difficulty modes (Casual, Normal, Nightmare)
- 12 pick ups and 9 unlockable abilities
- 4 player local co-op
- Controller support <3
- Steam Trading Cards, Achievements, and Leaderboards

Its currently priced at $1.99, if you'd like a free copy to try it out I'd be more then happy to hand some out!
Steam Version (Doesn't require to steam to run once installed): http://store.steampowered.com/app/397570/
DRM Free Version : http://extrokold.itch.io/shmadow
We'l be releasing on PS4, Xbox One, and WiiU early next year.

[MathU]

Really appreciate you making this DRM-free and being explicit about it too.

[rjdunlap]

Yeah, our primary goal is for people to have fun and not get in their way of having fun. We provided all the nifty Steam features (trading cards, achievements, Steam leaderboards) and rolled our own global leaderboard on the DRM free version; which we'll probably integrate into the Steam one since it only shows friend's scores. We also have mac & linux support, and tried to provide as many translations as we could (12 languages / locals).

[rjdunlap]

http://steamcommunity.com/stats/397570/ ... 03825?sr=1

Would like to see what high scores you guys can post. Zerst from the IRC holds 3rd place with 611,838

[Krimzon Kitzune]

Guys, why aren't you playing this? It's AWESOME.

[cave hermit]

Well I attempted to play it, but for some reason the graphics are completely spazzing out on me, with random vectors just popping in and out all over the screen in a weird seizure pattern during gameplay.

Not really sure what's wrong here; different resolutions and full screen mode don't seem to fix it.

edit: ok, seemed like I had to force my laptop to use the nvidia card over the integrated one. seems to work fine now.

[cave hermit]

Ok, so initial thoughts:

+ The music is pretty nice.
+ I like the system where you pick up the weapons of bosses as subweapons.
+ At least on normal difficulty the game seems to have a reasonable dificulty level.

- Why are there almost no sound effects at all besides the lasers and time slow? It's just really jarring.
- Correct me if I'm wrong, but there doesn't seem to be any difficulty curve where the game continues to increase in difficulty as you continue to play a single round, which could harm replay-ability.
- There doesn't seem to be a whole lot to scoring besides just shooting everything. Maybe add some kinda multiplier system, or point items?

As it is, the game is a bit barebones, but I do like it, and I think it has the potential to be a fantastic game if it's polished up a bit more!

[rjdunlap]

There is a difficulty curve where the game continues to increase in difficulty as you continue to play; we increase the speed, health, and damage of the enemies as the game progresses. We can try amplifying that up or find new ways of increasing the difficulty up.

We do hope to keep adding to it, right now its finding the right things to add in.