Dark Stars - my first shmup is out!

[ahiatt14]

Hi y'all,
About a year back I posted a demo of my first major game project, the experimental "anti-shmup" Dark Stars. It has changed significantly since then, and now has a faster pace and more varied/useful abilities. The game is out now, available at my itch.io page: axethetail.itch.io/dark-stars. It's free unless you want to pay, so feel free to check it out! Since it's my first major game and also a rather unusual one, I'm interested in feedback more than money. But if you are feeling extra generous, you could head to my Greenlight page and vote: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/f ... 0&result=1.

Dark Stars is an "anti-shmup" or "non-shooting shmup" in the parlance of the forums. The player's abilities are tied to collecting and using the souls of enemy crews. The core loop is centered on the trade-offs between soul saving, which grants you shields, or soul spending, which lays down bullet-swallowing traps and fires homing bombs. Levels are organized like most vertical shmups, but enemy ships can't be destroyed by the player, only incapacitated via conversion. Converted ships drift and spin out of control, ramming other ships and potentially clearing the screen. Combat comes down to knowing where to lay traps, when to give up your shields, how to smash enemies into one another, and of course pure dodging.

Thanks for any interest/feedback!

Here's a new gameplay trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNzwP5WhBpc

Large screencaps below:

Spoiler

[BulletMagnet]

Finally got a chance to try this: thought the demo was neat, still generally feel the same about the "full" release. A few thoughts:

- Still dig the back-and-forth between "regular" grazing and feeding the maw to keep yourself in top shape - it reminds me of chaining shields together in Radirgy or Karous. Crashing enemies into one another is great, though I find it tricky to predict which way they veer once you disable them; I almost wish there was a "push" mechanic of some kind to direct them a bit more, um, directly.

- I've only played the first three stages so far, but from what I've seen I like the presentation and story; it looks like future levels have a nice amount of variety to them too.

- My main complaint is that it's very easy to get nailed by an enemy that just appeared from the edge of the screen, since you'll be spending a lot of time riskily nuzzling up to baddies farther upscreen, and a single hit is enough to restart the stage if you don't have a shield up. Some manner of warning icon for incoming baddies would help a lot.

- I still find the hitboxes for both you and enemies a bit fiddly, though I got a bit more used to them as I played longer.

- My laptop ran the game fine, though you might want to include a handful of graphics options just in case. The ability to turn off the story/dialogue sequences and/or instantly restart the stage you just died on would be nice too. My third-party 360 controller worked great too, though again control rebinds might not be a bad idea for others.

Good stuff overall, and pretty different from what you usually see; will definitely upvote you on Greenlight, let me know if there's anything specific you'd like more input on.

[ahiatt14]

Thanks so much for the feedback!

- Thanks! The only reason the game exists is because I took that core idea and just ran with it, despite some now-clear inherent flaws. The "push" idea is a good one. I wasn't a good enough coder when I built the core of the project to allow levels to respond dynamically to a screen cleared of ships. I axed some powerful player abilities because they allowed you to clear the screen and then you just had to hang out for 5/10+ seconds until the next batch of enemies spawned.

- Writing a story in this format (and resisting the urge to dump buckets of exposition inside each level) was really difficult, so I'm glad to hear it somewhat works. I did try to give the levels mechanical and narrative variety, seeing as how there's no mechanical progression on the player's side (tho I tried to give the maw enough depth that a player's strategy might evolve throughout the game).

- A warning arrow for offscreen enemies is a great obvious idea I might have had had I playtested the game more. I'll implement that in the next update.

- I was admittedly stubborn about not reducing the player to a glowing collidable dot with a ship skin underneath despite the obvious benefits to readability. Like you said, moving closely around and through groups of enemy ships isn't something most players are used to, so added readability would go a long way.

- You can actually quickly restart if you just pause and hit restart, it's much faster at least than waiting thru the game over screen. I did actually have a dedicated instant restart button and removed it becaaaause, I can't remember. I can put that back in. Also thought about a story toggle, I can add that. Rebinds are like a must for me now and all future projects will have that feature, tho the code in this project is poorly organized enough that I don't know that I'll want to go back in for that.

Thanks a million again! If you play further, I'd love to hear impressions. IMO the quality of the levels generally increases as the game goes on. I'll bump this thread when I update the build with any significant changes.