first of all:
nice job with the weapon risk mechanics, it sure is fun to get right in an ememy's grill and bust his ass with the laser (i only play with ship 3, seems to me there is no other choice).
ship 3 seems best for scoring. But as long as you have problems surviving, ship 2 is better, because it´s close range attack makes it invincible as long as the gauge isn´t empty. That´s really broken about the game: with ship 2, you can just close in on any boss enemy, right in the middle of a pattern, so the constant buzzing keeps your gauge filled, and the gauge makes you invincible, so the sword does maximum damage all the time, and there´s no challenge involved. But ship 3 gives better scores during stages, that´s why this cheap trick doesn´t throw the game off completely. Oh, and it doesn´t work on hard difficulty. Ship 1 is rather useless when you want to play seriously, but it´s spreadshot weapon makes it easy to get into the game. It was designed as a pure beginner´s ship and nothing else.
The score system, obviously, derives from 2 games: Zero Gunner 2 and Dragon Blaze. At that time, I wanted to get the Dragon Blaze PCB, and I found Zero Gunner 2 great except for the fact it isn´t tate, so that´s why I chose the system that´s there. Ship 3 was an afterthought, I wanted to make the game more flexible, but you can see it´s not really finished by the clumsy way the homing laser behaves. I tried several homing laser algorithms, but none worked the way I wanted it. A few caused the game to hang sometimes, the one that is in now didn´t, that´s the only reason it turned out like this. I also think the weapon looks horrible, I wanted a color that wasn´t in the game elsewhere, so it would always contrast well, but it doesn´t, and it looks like shit, too.
the whole game has a nice rythm to it, and while this is largely because of the memorization and course planning, it is still quite fun to play through the first levels, even after multiple attempts.
thanks. Level design took the most effort by far, with an extremely primitive editor, and the rhythm... I tried to mimic Psikyo games, which were my favourites at the time. Nowadays, I´d do something more like Toaplan probably.
are difficulty levels only separated by the speed and frequency of fire, or are there new patterns i haven't seen/noticed?
difficulty influences: the speed with which the gauge fills, enemy toughness, fire rate and bullet speed. No new patterns, sorry. Easy difficulty means half of the bullets are omitted (I´m not entirely sure about that, as I only have a post-release sourcecode to look at right now).
how does the replay feature work? the only one i see is a very short type 1 run.
The replay feature doesn´t really work. It´s supposed to work like this: One replay per difficulty plus the recent playthrough is stored, namely that of the current hiscore on that difficulty, so if you achieve a new hiscore, your replay should be saved automatically. What the replay function does is store all inputs in a file and play them back when replay is triggered. Replay can be triggered via menu (in that case, the hiscore replays) or by not doing anything in the menu (in that case, the last playthrough). But for reasons I couldn´t figure out, the thing lacks precision, which means often the player in a replay dies where the real player survived. I was thinking about rounding errors, timing discrepancies (shouldn´t matter, as everything is rendered and calculated in frames), or maybe I overlooked something in the code. I even eliminated all randomness by storing a fake random field for the places the medals are triggered when killing an enemy. Didn´t work anyway.
One solution I didn´t think of back then would be storing death points along with inputs and eliminating collision check when playing back a replay.
does type 3 power-up?
yes, it does. However, the close range weapon is so strong it almost doesn´t make a difference. But the number of homing lasers fired represents the current weaponlevel. The problem with this ship is it´s very hard to power-up. Power Ups only occur along with silver medals, not along with gold medals. But to get silver medals with ship 3, you need to first buzz a little, then kill something with the laser, and then you only have a fixed random chance of getting the power-up (hey, THAT could be the random factor I didn´t eliminate, which fucks up the replays). Now once you got a power-up you may not collide with enemies, because that causes power-down, and using a close range weapon most of the time makes collision with enemies pretty likely. I was thinking about changing that difficulty back then, like giving ship 3 power-ups along with gold medals, but I figured ship 3 is the ultimate scoring tool, designed for expert players, so I left it that way. Theoretically, a fully-powered up ship 3 should be able to tear through bosses in no time using it´s close range weapon, but I never managed to do that myself or haven´t seen anyone do it. However, there were a few people back then who beat my score like 20 or even a hundred times. Some of them used ship 3, so it´s not unlikely someone used that trick.
can i assume that the version available now is basically the final release?
Bloodrain itself is finished the way it is. I´ve always hated the way Warning Forever evolved through so many versions, because once you got a nice score, people were already playing a new version with different scoring. I think shmups really depend on being fixed in a certain state. Now, of course I´m aware of several flaws the game has, and I´ve been considering a follow-up (codenamed "Bloodrain DX") ever since release. There were several follow-up efforts, all sharing the attribute "over-ambitious". Bloodrain was done in 2 months, while doing a regular dayjob at the same time. I was really burned out after that, it´s probably also the reason why I chose to release so early, I just couldn´t stand the pressure anymore. There were 9 (!) beta versions, sometimes within a few days, but the last one had been a whole month past and consisted of only one level, I was hanging in the air, needing feedback, but realizing people were tired of all the betas
But having made it within 2 months, almost from scratch (there was a Saturn prototype in the Dezaemon 2 editor) also gave a big boost in confidence, so the follow-up was supposed to have professional quality. But everybody in the team had dayjobs to work for, other things to take care of, two people were going off to Japan, we were losing focus, and the projected time investment went beyond 2 years, so of course everybody began to think what else you could do in 2 years. Then there was an editor, codenamed "Bullet Ballet", I tried building an engine for 10 shmups simultaneously, but only one of the 10 people stayed on the project, and I needed variations to build a flexible engine, so after half a year I gave that up. After that, situation at work got bad (mobbing), I got pneumonia and didn´t really think about programming any longer.
Recently, I´ve started considering to learn software development as a job, which on the one hand means I might be skilled enough to do a follow-up properly, but on the other hand means I might be fed up with coding after work so much I´ll never get around to it. That´s why I don´t want to promise anything.
Anyway, thanks for asking.
