Cave announces Deathsmiles as next Steam release!

[Shepardus]

I have already purchased the game, but I will wait and see how Degica and Cave respond over the next few weeks to decide whether I initiate a refund. I will support them if they continue to support their games.

FYI the Steam refund policy is for games you've played under 2 hours and have purchased within the last 14 days. They do allow some leeway but be careful not to wait too long before initiating a refund.

[CKR]

FYI the Steam refund policy is for games you've played under 2 hours and have purchased within the last 14 days. They do allow some leeway but be careful not to wait too long before initiating a refund.

Yes, I am aware. Degica has a pretty good track record, so I will wait for the updates before making a decision.

[Aisha]

Is the slowdown the same as the 360 version, or did they actually make it worse?

It is disappointing that the slow down issue has come up again. I am concerned that without Blackbird's frequent communication that issues like this aren't as likely to be fixed.

I agree; the back-and-forth between the community and Degica was great. It would be a shame if issues in this port didn't get fixed due to a lack of communication.

Hopefully Blackbird is doing well, despite whatever led him to step aside and distance himself.

[CStarFlare]

They did fix slowdown for the western 360 releases, and the Japanese players will likely have something to say about it as well. I expect slowdown to be fixed with or without Blackbird - though of course his presence here made us all much more confident that we'd be heard.

[Milspex]

Bought it for the support, hoping they will release more if it sells well.

Could do with a Akai Katana port next though...

[Xyga]

Maybe they've decided they don't need someone to speak with actual shmups communities so they don't have to worry about the quality of the ports anymore ?

[Milspex]

Blackbird has fallen off the face of the earth so it seems.

[Observer]

Yep, I'm missing Blackbird myself already, his intervention in the beta of Dariusburst made that game the definitive version, especially with the dual screen setup. Plus he kept the discussion going and in genre like this, it's a must, there is a reason why that DBCS thread has over 62 pages. Never before I saw the forum that alive (except when CAVE decided to throw a new arcade release)

Anyway! I tried it yesterday and played MBL Normal and Arcade Normal. I reached the Gorge or whatever is called and holy shit difficulty ramped up so hard I had no chances when I touched the final stage.

Arcade mode seems to only have a "smooth" filter that makes everything blurry as fuck so no idea what's the point of that. Unfilitered it looks like a PS2 emulator with deinterlacing off. So... I'm not so sure I will be playing the arcade original. Maybe someone else can measure how faithful that version is or there are ways to mod it as that's where PC shines the best.

Since this is the only version I played I can't describe the slowdowns although I did see a lot of them but I have no idea if they were more frequent. I liked what I played but some of the goals set in the achievements are depressing. I doubt I'll bother with those.

[Chojin]

I will be picking it up tonight when I get home, I have a decent spec PC so hopefully it runs ok, the price it better that I was expecting (I saw stuff it would £19.99)

[CStarFlare]

Did you guys notice the Deathsmiles RPG Maker packs on Steam? Kind of neat.

EDIT: Though the OST is as expensive as the game. wtg degi

[Bananamatic]

so
whens sdoj?

[NeoStrayCat]

Did you guys notice the Deathsmiles RPG Maker packs on Steam? Kind of neat.

EDIT: Though the OST is as expensive as the game. wtg degi

I think that's a mistake, but I'm guessing it that's included with the game for the 1st week, it'll probably go back to normal next week.

so, whens sdoj?

So...when's mahvel? Now Staph...>.> (Sorry...<.<)

[cave hermit]

so
whens sdoj?

It'll probably be released in conjunction with the announcement of Dodonpachi Sugoidaioujou at e3; you know, to keep fans busy while they put the finishing touches on the new game.

[Chacranajxy]

Maybe they've decided they don't need someone to speak with actual shmups communities so they don't have to worry about the quality of the ports anymore ?

That doesn't make sense. If they got into this market, they're no doubt aware that they're catering to a discerning audience. They're not just going to intentionally throw port quality to the wind.

[cul]

/!\ Important regarding stuttering/slowdown /!\

It has the exact same issue than mushihimesama with me on my 2 monitors PC: I have to disable mutliple monitors in Nvidia control panel and have only one monitor active to run it smooth.

So if you have stuttering/bad FPS crap, AND are running a pc on multiple monitors, try this.

[Strikers1945guy]

so
whens sdoj?

Right after the highly anticipated Pink Sweets release

So easy to advertise aswell. Just have some stupid quip about "The entire game is fully of cute little toys and robots but it's ball crushingly hard" and you would at least get a few curious people try it out.

With SDOJ the non shmup crowd just sees another spaceship shooter type game and move on without a second glance.

[zakk]

It's the perfect steam indie game! It can have tags like 'retro', 'female protagonist' and since it is very hard let's just add 'rouge-like elements'

so
whens sdoj?

Right after the highly anticipated Pink Sweets release

So easy to advertise aswell. Just have some stupid quip about "The entire game is fully of cute little toys and robots but it's ball crushingly hard" and you would at least get a few curious people try it out.

With SDOJ the non shmup crowd just sees another spaceship shooter type game and move on without a second glance.

[cul]

I'd freaking love Pink Sweets with its 360 arrange mode.

[Durandal]

I have a gut feeling CAVE/Degica will release a complete anthology of every DonPachi game on Steam combined as one game
It's not like I never predicted the future, but who knows, it'd be the most guaranteed series to sell

[brentsg]

I don't have any stuttering or anything like graphic anomalies that I noticed, running at 60 FPS for me. There might be a bit of tearing so I'll need to look into that. I do have no slowdown though, as in it seems completely missing. It's return worthy at this point, so time will tell.

I don't mind paying for the Steam releases to tinker around with, but I already own the games on PCB and Xbox, so I'm certainly not going to buy ports with no attempt to get them close to the originals.

[Observer]

Do you have VSync enabled on your video card settings? That could be a cause since the game definitely has the slowdown in but if you disable certain options it goes Touhou-fast mode. (Some doujin games also break depending on videocard settings and it varies wildly from PC to PC.)

[The Coop]

http://i64.tinypic.com/292wi38.jpg

Well, that's a visual glitch I wasn't expecting, and it's on every game mode thus far.

[NickPalmerDegica]

Hey everyone.

I too, miss having Blackbird involved on our shmup titles, unfortunately, his departure was not something in my hands. I will also not pretend to be the shmup expert he was. As for the lack of a stream. I do admit I would have loved to do a stream for Deathsmiles before release, but that was out of our hands for a number of reasons (that I would elaborate on but they are boring office things). We are though, interested in finding someone who could handle something like streams for us on new shmup releases, as I don't have the experience to really do it justice (or the upload speed, I cannot stream from my computer).

But we are very interested in maintaining a good relationship with the shmup community, and definitely are interested in making sure any issues that are being encountered are resolved as quickly as we can.

I'll talk to the producer tomorrow about getting a good bug thread up for the Steam forum. And both he and myself will try to be as active as we can in this thread as possible. We are not interested in dumping and running. We want to bring over more games from CAVE and other shmup devs, and treating you guys to bad, unfixed ports would be a really bad move, both ethically and well, financially for us. (And I do try to be an ethical person, and I also like the company making money because it keeps me employed).

Thanks for your patience. I know Blackbird was great on shmups, and its a transition. My specialty is not on the individual level, so I apologize that I'm not as up to things on shmups as him (I handle all our community and social media, across all games and game engines we release. My game specialty is a bit in another direction). But our producers are more knowledgeable on the subject, so I consult with them, and will make sure any complaints made make it to them.

On any of the glitches described, would people mind giving me a more detailed explanation? I'm trying to understand the slowdown being discussed for instance, like, what is supposed to happen, what is happening. That way I have something to bug the producers with to get fixed.

[HenAi]

On any of the glitches described, would people mind giving me a more detailed explanation? I'm trying to understand the slowdown being discussed for instance, like, what is supposed to happen, what is happening. That way I have something to bug the producers with to get fixed.

On the slowdown specifically, basically, in the arcade version, the game slows down on the specific parts of the game - generally, that's because the hardware the arcade version is running on can't maintain full speed with the amount of bullets/enemies on the screen. So, in something like a FPS, that's something you'd want to avoid. However, in a shmup, those parts are expected and basically part of the design - simply put, the slowdown makes those parts somewhat easier and that's something the designers of the game knew when they put it together. So when the slowdown is missing, those parts get harder than originally intended.
In addition, and this is particularly important for shmups, if slowdown is missing, that makes those parts of the game work differently than the arcade version. And usually, the main (final) draw of shmups is achieving the highest possible score without continues on the same conditions - meaning if slowdown is missing from one version, scores achieved in that version aren't comparable to the original arcade version.
So you basically want the game on PC to perform like the arcade version as exactly as possible, including slowdown.

[Bananamatic]

if the next game is sdoj or futari hit me up if you need a play tester

[CKR]

Nick,

I am lurker on these forums, but I think that maybe these ideas would be helpful. It would be helpful to have a few players that have attained high scores participate in the betas. This would help resolve some issues before release. I am pretty sure that this was done with previous releases.

It would be great if Degica could establish a relationship with STG Weekly. They would do a great job with any pre-release streams. As far as the slow down goes, I will defer to players like Tyjet. Tyjet could definitely explain it better than I ever could. I am glad that you guys are on the forums to show your support of the game. Good luck with selling the game to as many people as possible.

[NickPalmerDegica]

Awesome, thanks for the heads up.

I'll look into it and tell our producer and programmers what I can about the slowdown issues. I'll also look into contacting STG, thanks for the suggestion. And yes, anything Tyjet can tell us about getting it as close to what the shmup fandom wants will be great. I really enjoyed playing Deathsmiles, but I'll admit to being a bit of a shmup noob, so the slowdown wasn't something I was looking for (also, I'm not a tester or a producer, I was playing through it to learn more about it to promote, so I'll admit I was looking for different things entirely.)

Also, we are looking into opening up our degibeta testers group again soon, and I'll definitely post info about it when we do. We have a few shmup fans in the testing group, but pulling a few testers from here for shmups would be a huge plus. We are NOT done publishing shooters. We have plans for the future, though I can't talk about them yet, and we hope that you guys are going to stay excited. In all seriousness, I can't tell you how much in conversations I've had with our lead producer how much we love publishing shmups because the fans are great, and we definitely don't want to abandon you guys. There has been a little shakeup with communication because of some people leaving (such as blackbird) but I promise we'll do our best to keep on the ball.

And we are going to do everything we can to get everything right with each release.

PS: When you type shmup like 20 times in one post does it just start looking weird...

EDIT: PSS: Also screw hackers, I'll look into something on the leaderboard issues first thing Monday.

[NeoStrayCat]

Well, thanks for the notice NPD, hope you and the producer there can do the same as Blackbird would have done, keep things going for the Degica crew!

And yeah, the port is flawless, but yeah, may have some trouble spots here and there. And yes, screw hackers, this was apparent in Mushi, hope this can be justifiable for DeathSmiles.

[Shepardus]

Good to hear from Degica! You should probably let CAVE know that the NA release of Deathsmiles on the X360 had similar (the same?) issues with missing slowdown, but according to what I've heard patches largely resolved the issue. I'm guessing CAVE forgot to include the patches when porting the game over to PC (this also happened with the music in the Mushihimesama 1.5 DLC), so porting over said patches might be easier than trying to work out the slowdown anew.

PS: When you type shmup like 20 times in one post does it just start looking weird...

It never stops looking weird, it only gets weirder the more you think about it.

[BIL]

what is shump~

I hope Blackbird's doing ok, he's always been cool imho