Bullet Boss Beta - in-deveopment and open to feedback!

[Kalseng]

Hello, friends!

I recently published a game over on GameJolt called Bullet Boss. It's my senior thesis project, and more of a proof-of-concept and beta than a fully-fledged game.

I put a lot of love into it and tried to make it what I wanted, but I realized that without opening the discussion up to the shmup/bullet hell community, I wasn't gonna get the kind of feedback I really needed and wanted. So, here I am! Asking for feedback.

I'm specifically looking for feedback on the bullet patterns and mechanics. (Are the patterns fun? Are they challenging enough? Are the mechanics too simple? Too complex?) I also have little-to-no scoring system, so any suggestions or recommendations would be greatly appreciated.

Here are some screenshots:

Spoiler

The game is located here, at GameJolt!

If you played the game, please comment either there or here, and please honestly rate my game over at GameJolt! (5's help, but I'd so much rather have honest feedback.)

I've got a decent amount of time on my hands with graduation behind me, so I'm up for regular updates and responding to feedback as it comes in. Thank you for taking your time to look at my little love project, and thank you a thousand times over if you played and left me some comments!

[BulletMagnet]

Since this is a school project more than a full-fledged game that puts a bit of a different spin on things, but here are a few thoughts:

- For future games joystick/controller support would be a good thing to include if possible, though Joy2Key worked okay here. A bit more of an ending (and a way to quit out "normally" when you're done) would also be good.

- Obviously you didn't have a whole lot of resources to put into the presentation, and I don't know how much art/design background you have, but a bit more of a cohesive (for lack of a better word) style would be a plus; i.e. the player craft is recognizable as some sort of spaceship/jet, but the boss is an abstract block with kanji (or something kanji-ish, I wouldn't know!) on it, they don't seem to belong in the same game (and then there's the 3D-ish stuff in the background). More interesting bullets than colored dots would be good to consider as well. On the bright side I didn't have any major visibility issues, and the game ran fine on my laptop, so the simplicity isn't a bad thing altogether, it just needs more polish.

- I've always been a bit iffy on the "using a bomb lowers your power level" thing, unless it's part of a well-implemented risk/reward scoring mechanism...also, the way power-ups dropped from the boss seemed somewhat random, I'm not sure if there was much rhyme or reason to how much stuff dropped or where exactly it fell.

- My favorite parts were when the boss messed with the level (the last one in particular was something of a surprise, though perhaps not practical outside of an experimental setting); I'd be curious to see what else you could come up with on that front, because while the bullet patterns themselves were okay, I found myself much more intrigued by the other stuff going on around them.

Hopefully that gave you something to work with; congrats on graduating.

[mystran]

I actually tried the WebGL version a day or two ago (no idea if this is the same as the download, if not, then let me know and I'll try the download too), forgot to post about it. Played up to the point where it said "victory" and personally I found the presentation to be fine, except for the abrupt changes in screen position which made my head feel a little nasty. The concept is fun, but smooth it out somehow, right now it's not very nice.

The bullet patterns seemed a little basic (ie: static stream of bullets at fixed rate, spiral of bullets with fixed gaps and so on) and not very challenging to dodge (because you can immediately tell how the pattern works and everything is slow enough that you have plenty of time to plan ahead), and the slow streams of aimed bullets (as a safe-spot eliminator I assume) encourage rather boring "tap slightly, wait for hole to arrive, tap slightly again" type of dodging, especially with items constantly dropping from boss roughly center of the screen as well, so no real reason to move more than slightly and nothing else really encourages anything more complicated either.

I had no idea there was either power levels or bombs (well, I suppose I saw the keybind), but then again I probably wasn't really paying much attention either.

I remember almost giving up when it wanted me to use space-bar for shooting and shift for focus, it's not the worst possible config, but something that maps nicely to a row of letters (eg. zxc or asd or whatever) would be kinda nicer.

Anyway.. overall I felt like it was a perfectly acceptable little shmup, besides what I mentioned above, nothing really felt "bad" (which is a good sign and not as common as one would hope) although I did find it a little hard to stay focused because of the lack of difficulty and somewhat static gameplay.

If you want to take it further (and I do feel like you have a rather solid basis to work from), I'd try to make the patterns less predictable and more dynamic and/or try to think of what the ideal way to dodge each pattern would be and then try to design for variety (ie. slow vs. fast movements, accurate positioning vs. large scale mis-direction, moving side-ways vs. moving up and down; throw me a PM if you want some ideas, I've been collecting some notes for a project of my own). I'd also bump the tempo a little bit, since it helps keep the game more interesting even if it's a little on the easy side.