Witchinour

[sofutogeimu]

Update: The current iteration of Witchinour is, in short, being scrapped. However, the concept of low-rez bullet hell witch action is still the foundation for the game: you can read more here

Hey everyone, I've been working on a shmup for a while now and finally launched a Greenlight for it. It's called Witchinour and it's a straight-up, 6 stage manic shmup. Aesthetically I wanted to try my hand at something cute but the enemy attacks and general design is more akin to DDP. Instead of implementing a loop I've opted for a hard mode that is unlocked after 1ccing the game. As for scoring, at present there is medal chaining and a post-stage bonus based on the number of lives the player has. I've been toying around with having medals give bonus points for a period after they've spawned before "popping" and turning silver.

Anyway, here's the Greenlight page. Thanks in advance to anyone who takes a peek at it.

[donluca]

Remove the suicide bullets and we have a deal.

[clippa]

Looks great, I've voted. Really like the 8 bit music
I didn't see any suicide bullets.
Aaaah, it's a pun on "witching hour", the penny took longer to drop than it should have.

[Despatche]

A few enemies shown don't shoot at all until they're destroyed, but that's a total non-issue.

Mini sprites never get old, I think. Voted.

[dan76]

Voted. Looks good.

[sofutogeimu]

Launched an itch and released a demo! You can find it here: https://sofuto.itch.io/witchinour

[BulletMagnet]

Gave this a quick spin:

- Overall a solid foundation; not a lot of bells and whistles, but the movement speed and fire rate felt good to me. Third-party 360 controller worked fine.

- A tad frustrating when a medal has a bullet "riding" it as it leaves the screen and you're forced to miss it, but that was an annoyance going all the way back to Garegga, not sure if there's much to be done about it.

- Appreciate the fact that most walls don't hurt you, but when you're close enough up against one your bullets can get "caught" on it; assuming that wasn't intentional?

- I know simplicity is the goal here, but I almost feel like there ought to be a couple of Vilcabamba-esque secrets or something like that scattered around to spice things up just a bit...

[sofutogeimu]

Gave this a quick spin:

- Overall a solid foundation; not a lot of bells and whistles, but the movement speed and fire rate felt good to me. Third-party 360 controller worked fine.

- A tad frustrating when a medal has a bullet "riding" it as it leaves the screen and you're forced to miss it, but that was an annoyance going all the way back to Garegga, not sure if there's much to be done about it.

- Appreciate the fact that most walls don't hurt you, but when you're close enough up against one your bullets can get "caught" on it; assuming that wasn't intentional?

- I know simplicity is the goal here, but I almost feel like there ought to be a couple of Vilcabamba-esque secrets or something like that scattered around to spice things up just a bit...

I appreciate the feedback! I had actually forgotten about the wall issue, I went ahead and fixed it and reuploaded the demo. Regarding the medals' movement speed/scoring mechanics: I'm still open to experimenting with that stuff. I mainly wanted to hammer out the basic gameplay/aesthetic stuff first. One idea I've considered is chaining with a fairly low reset time and/or a limit to the values (more DonPachi than DDP; I'd want to avoid exponential score increases if I did chaining) but whatever I do, I want to make sure it feels natural and not like I forced it in.

[Shepardus]

- A tad frustrating when a medal has a bullet "riding" it as it leaves the screen and you're forced to miss it, but that was an annoyance going all the way back to Garegga, not sure if there's much to be done about it.

That can be helped by making the medal hitboxes larger than the bullet hitboxes, or the collection hitbox bigger than the collision hitbox. Not sure if that's the case here, as I'm not really sure how big the hitboxes are.

Are there any powerups in this game? The main shot feels a little weak to me. I could kill stuff with it fine for the most part, but it felt lacking in impact, and if that's the shot for the whole game it could end up being underwhelming. I wanted to use my bombs more since that temporarily powers up the shot, but didn't see any incentive to do so.

Other than that it was pretty neat. I agree with BulletMagnet that some secrets a la Life Fortress Volcabamba (I assume that's what he was talking about) would be nice to have.

[sofutogeimu]

- A tad frustrating when a medal has a bullet "riding" it as it leaves the screen and you're forced to miss it, but that was an annoyance going all the way back to Garegga, not sure if there's much to be done about it.

That can be helped by making the medal hitboxes larger than the bullet hitboxes, or the collection hitbox bigger than the collision hitbox. Not sure if that's the case here, as I'm not really sure how big the hitboxes are.

Are there any powerups in this game? The main shot feels a little weak to me. I could kill stuff with it fine for the most part, but it felt lacking in impact, and if that's the shot for the whole game it could end up being underwhelming. I wanted to use my bombs more since that temporarily powers up the shot, but didn't see any incentive to do so.

Other than that it was pretty neat. I agree with BulletMagnet that some secrets a la Life Fortress Volcabamba (I assume that's what he was talking about) would be nice to have.

The lack of firepower is intentional; it's something I thought about a lot a while ago after reading a thread on here about single screen games like Galaga, etc. I think a lot of games go overboard with powerups and that the impetus to move doesn't primarily have to be brought on by enemy bullets. With that said, I'm aiming for normal mode's difficulty curve to be very approachable whereas hard mode will contain the kind of bullet density, etc that I personally want out of a game.

Once again, thanks for the feedback! I really appreciate you guys giving it a shot.

[Ebbo]

The game is certainly enjoyable. Very simple but solid gameplay and has enough character to keep me interested. Actually I think you should capitalize even more on the cute part of the cute'em up. The black, cavernous backgrounds feel somewhat drab when compared with the upbeat music and character design.

What I don't like is the way how bombing penalizes your score by breaking the chain. Every time a shmup does this it instinctively makes me to avoid pressing the bomb button and that's no fun at all. At the very least the punishment for bombing shouldn't be as harsh as dying and optimally I'd like to see the bomb act more of as a tool rather than a simple resource.

[Despatche]

Bombing is pretty lame, unless you go through the effort of making bombing not-lame like Yagawa did. You have to design the entire game around that.

Instead of killing the chain, just have a separate bonus for bombs. All elements of scoring should be equal, and you should never reward the player many times for a single action. Dying should only affect a life bonus, not a life bonus + a bomb bonus + some counter + enemies get to escape.

[Doctor Butler]

I dig it!

[The Armchair General]

Nice little game you got here! One criticism I for it is that the death animation and the bomb animation are the same which can make me think I bombed when I actually died for a second.

[sofutogeimu]

So, a while ago, I felt like I hit a dead end with regards to Witchinour's design and decided to scrap the current iteration of it. It's no longer a horizontal shmup but I will say that it stays true to the theme I had in mind and I am much happier working on it now. I've also decided to get away from the idea of keeping things simple. One difficult lesson I learned along the way is that my design aptitude definitely does not lie in minimalism. Anyway, if you wanna read a little more, I posted an announcement on Steam: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/f ... 1465698274

[Pixel_Outlaw]

Looks to be 160 x 96 pixel resolution but some of the enemy sprites look to be half that resolution?
Maybe do the enemy sprites in the same resolution for consistency.

The sprites done in different resolutions just kind of rubs me the wrong way.
Still congrats on getting your game out there!

[sofutogeimu]

Looks to be 160 x 96 pixel resolution but some of the enemy sprites look to be half that resolution?
Maybe do the enemy sprites in the same resolution for consistency.

The sprites done in different resolutions just kind of rubs me the wrong way.
Still congrats on getting your game out there!

Regarding the resolution stuff, I went with pixel perfect scaling this time around. I thought smoothness at the expense of mixels was worth it for a while but my mind changed after constantly seeing it up close.

[Shepardus]

FYI Witchinour is now a procedurally generated top-down shooter along the lines of Nuclear Throne, and is out on Steam and itch.io for $4.99. Trailer

[Despatche]

As cute as it is, we have way too many of these games and this is not what I voted for.

[Legendary Hoamaru]

Disappointing change honestly, but it still looks fun enough.