Received my Skycurser PCB today, some pix

[OdiousTrident]

So there are 4 missions despite 6 levels on the mission select screen?

It looks great I just hope there is more content.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

So there are 4 missions despite 6 levels on the mission select screen?

It got an early release while it's still in development, and there are free updates offered via WiFi, so those levels are going to be playable; they just aren't released yet.

they didn't know enough about the genre to have ever heard of a relatively obscure title like Thunder Blaster.

Yeah, but you don't have to have played Pulstar, Thunder Blaster, Blazing Star, or even the kusoge Eight Forces to know that rewarding constant, frantic button mashing as a primary game mechanic is a bad idea. I mean, unless carpal tunnel/repetitive stress injury is your thing. I mean as much as I love Giga Wing for requiring a surprisingly slow tap speed to max out the fire rate (the slowest tap speed in any shmup I have played) I still prefer to play it with an autofire button when possible.

But it's still in the midst of getting updates, so who knows, its mechanics could get a serious overhaul down in a few months and it'd play quite differently then.

[Aurich]

Thank goodness for RGB's autofire board, but it's sounding like the pretty face is all that this has going for it. A pity.

[trap15]

But it's still in the midst of getting updates, so who knows, its mechanics could get a serious overhaul down in a few months and it'd play quite differently then.

Considering we've had it for at least 6 months and they've never fixed any actual problems, good fuckin luck.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

I'm just trying to be optimistic because it'd be nice to see it succeed and become a decent shmup.

Honestly, anyone who saw the development thread knew was going to be serious gameplay issues. I don't care if it's an early alpha build, nobody sane would think it's a good idea to program a hori shmup that has a giant top-layer graphic in the corner of the playing field (on the side of the screen your ship spends 99% of its time) that covers/hides your entire player sprite when you move behind it. Just look at the player ship disappear behind it multiple times; the devteam raised one heck of a huge red flag from the very get-go.

[trap15]

I'm just trying to be optimistic because it'd be nice to see it succeed and become a decent shmup.

I felt the same way (though I was also very harsh on criticizing it) when I first played it at CAX last year. That they haven't fixed a single problem in a year means my hopes have sailed.

[Bananamatic]

why not just release it on steam like a normal dev

[pegboy]

Because you can't sell the gimmick of a "PCB kit" or cabinet to collectors for thousands of dollars on steam.

[trap15]

Because all it has going for it is the graphics and exclusivity.

[5pectre]

I like the Nazca Corp graphics but does the game has any scoring? I don't see a score counter only that kill counter in the middle?

[Jeneki]

I remember some videos from last year where score only appeared during stage transitions.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

The kills are your score. A recent update added food items that seem to appear during the hyper/bomb you can use that add a multiplier beside the kills. Scoring kills and raising the multiplier basically make up your score (score = kills x multiplier). For whatever reason, it doesn't show the total ingame, it only seems to tally up kills and multiplier together at the end on the score screen?

[Sumez]

Alright, here's my short summary of the game: trap15 is being way too nice to it.

I have played a lot of shitty shoot'em ups, and mostly the problems are a few classic reapparences, such as well-meaning but ultimately reductive euroshmup-tendencies, or maybe they are just boring with repetitive gameplay and level designs, but ultimately if you're large about that stuff and forget that better games exist, you can still have some fun with them playing them for what they are.
Skycurser however feels almost like it intentionally tries to remove everything that makes playing a shoot'em up fun. There's nothing entertaining about playing it, and even the gorgeous graphics get old really fast. I don't remember ever playing a worse game in the genre. It makes Sine Mora look like a masterpiece.

You can switch between two weapons, but to my knowledge there's no real trade-off. You want to play with the classic burst fire that feels like you're playing a shoot'em up, but essentially, the shotgun weapon is much more effective in every single situation, meaning you have to endure the same super loud repeated shotgun sound effect over and over and over and over throughout the entire game. In many places it's impossible to see what's going on due to blood splatter effects all over the screen, and everything, including your own ship, is gigantic, and everything that's not a popcorn enemy takes a billion shots to kill. And even if you do want to try to actually play the game like a real shmup and dodge the bullets, many situations are designed towards you using your melee attack to cancel them, which as is already mentioned, comes at no penalty whatsoever.

I have no ideas what the developers were thinking. Making a good shoot'em up is much harder than people think, but making one that's not awful isn't rocket science.

[schleichfahrt]

That sounds kinda bad.

I had hoped they would do something great with that undeniably awesome artwork.
Then again.. one of the first preview trailers I saw back then was about waves of "eyes" enemies, with a basic sine and a checkerboard pattern

[trap15]

They still do that lol. That's almost the entirety of one of the stages iirc.

[Sumez]

They definitely do that yeah. It's absurd.
Also forget to mention those weird attacks most bosses do where they fly offscreen and just appear somewhere instantly, giving you basically no way to react when you don't know what coming. It's kind of curious how much of the bosses bullets have wind up animations and stuff, while several instant attacks will gladly come with no warning at all. Of course, trap already touched on these in his writeup as well.

Anyone who knows me well will realise that I'm usually not this quick to shit-talk a game, and will typically reserve a lot of good faith in even the most shitty games, trying to find that glimmer that makes them unique and worth playing despite obvious rough edges and poor design choices. Unfortunately, there just is absolutely no such thing in Skycurser, it's completely baffling.
I'm really sorry to the devs, if they are watching this thread, I really didn't want to be this harsh on the game, and was actually looking forward to trying it, but I have to be honest about this.

[M.Knight]

Here's a feedback post I wrote about the game back in October 2016 :

Spoiler

Hello SkyCurser devs.
I played all of the three available stages but haven't reached the stage 3 boss. As such, my comments will focus on everything else.

Things I liked :


-The ship movement feels good, not too slow, and mostly not too fast. It might be a little bit difficult to do some very small dodges but that didn't really hindered my enjoyment of the game.

-The vulcan has some nice firepower. It seems different compared to the videos I saw online where it didn't look powerful. Glad to realize while playing that it is actually not the case.

-Slashing things with the katana is satisfying and I like that you can reflect some enemy projectiles Sin&Punishment-style with it.

-Pixel-art is top-notch and SkyCurser really looks like it could have been an 90s arcade game. Many props to you for avoiding the common pitfalls of "retro-wannabe" games that do not look like 80s/90s games at all.

-SkyCurser shows lots of personality in its visual design as well as in the way its bosses appear on the screen. It makes them feel more alive, kinda like in G-Darius.

-The three jauge system is a clever way to push the player towards using all its weapons and rewarding them for it. Reminds me a bit of Milestone shmups that power-up each weapon individually whenever you use them though the weapon set-up is a bit different in those games with shot+sword+shield instead.

-Stage level design seems suited to switching weapons regularly.

-Plane size seemed a bit big on the videos, but in-game, the level design seems mostly fit for it.


-------


Things I didn't like : (and like the proper French person I am, I'll rant a lot about stuff I don't like~)


-Boss patterns. Or should I say "Boss Instant Death moves". If the game were in an actual arcade and I put a credit in it, I would swear to never touch that game ever again in my entire life after having all my lives stolen by completely unfair attacks that have zero build-up or warning and take up the whole width or height of the screen.

Let's take Boss 1 for instance (the blue skull-octopus hybrid). It shoots bullets and lasers at you and then all of a sudden, its arm extends at the speed of light and if you are anywhere in front of the boss, which you will since you want to shoot at it, you instantly die. There is absolutely no way on earth to know the boss is going to do that unless you were already killed by it. To add insult to injury, that's not even the only unfair attack this boss has. When it exits the screen (with or without the tank), you have no way to know it is going to drop from above unless you were already killed by it. I don't think I saw any shadow or anything to tell us the boss would try to crush us from above.

Boss 2 has the exact same problem with its forward punch which is way too fast and its sudden uppercut that is not telegraphed at all.

Oddly enough, stage 1 boss shows you understand the concept of telegraphing attacks as the laser has a clear visual warning and you if you get killed by it, it is mostly your fault. The other attacks with large hitboxes would really benefit from that kind of fore-warning.

I don't know if this "memorizer" approach was intended or not (and based on the fact that stages are free of that bullshit, I would say it wasn't), but even if it were, that's not the way to do things. As it is, it is a real turn-off.

Furthermore, the few fair attack patterns such as the Boss1 purple laser+bullets or the Boss 2 flying rotating debris or green bullets seemed quite easy in comparaison, and maybe even too easy. If the boss difficulty only comes from those attacks that have to be learned by heart, then the bosses are going to be a cakewalk for somebody who knows exactly all the traps to avoid. A frustrating cakewalk as a slight timing mistake means instant unfair death but a cakewalk nonetheless.

Additional note : it seems Boss1 can kill you while getting into position before the fight, right after it taunts you and disappears and before it starts shooting/slashing at you. I suggest disabling the boss hitbox during that movement.

-The shotgun. It is completely useless. (*insert Dio shouting MUDA MUDA MUDA!*) I only use it because I want to fill the jauge and get a super in stock but often come to regret it soon afterwards. Enemy attacks are not what kills me the most during stages, it is actually the temptation to fill the shotgun jauge that does.

The issue with this weapon is twofold. First of all, as a crowd-control weapon that works at mid-range, that thing's terrible fire rate means using this weapon to destroy swarms of small fry will get you killed by one of them ramming into your ship during the second or so between two shots. But it wouldn't be that bad if this weapon was instead made to quickly deal with mid-sized ennemies who don't move too fast and stay at the right side of the screen.

That's when the second reason this weapon is useless kicks in : at close range, the katana is just simply better at almost everything. It has fast fire-rate, can deflect projectiles, is very powerful, and you can shoot with the vulcan at the same time. Speaking of that last advantage, combining the shotgun with the katana does not alleviate the problem given that it still means using the shotgun is handicapping yourself and you have to use the katana as a crutch. Besides, why do that when Vulcan + Katana is better? Not to mention the situations where you simply want to fill the shotgun jauge and using the katana alongside it "steals" kills and therefore jauge from the shotgun.

It is possible that later stages have more dangerous mid-sized ennemies where the slight difference in range between the katana and the shotgun can dissuade you from using the former weapon, but I didn't feel this in the demo stages at least.

Unlike the Milestone set-up I mentionned earlier where every weapon has a clear role (large shot, powerful close-range sword and defensive shield), the issue here is that the katana and the shotgun kinda compete with each other. Balancing those two so that each has a distinctive purpose and usefulness is not gonna be easy, but I think it needs to be done, especially with the super system that punishes you for ignoring any of the weapons (which wouldn't be a problem if all weapons are useful and fun to use).

-Boss HP seemed too high. Enough to have them repeat their patterns a bit.

-Minor one : Some small missiles shot by the boat on stage 3 seemed destructible gien how they look like, but they were not.



-----------



Things I suggest :

-Aside from changing the main shot button's function from vulcan to shotgun, is there any other change when switching weapons with the C button that I am not aware of? If not, then make C use the shotgun instead. It will be much more comfortable to have each weapon on a specific button than having to press the switch button and then press the shot button again.

Besides, it is much less confusing during hectic moments when you simply immediatly want to use your vulcan or your shotgun when in a pinch. This solution also has the benefit of not changing the overall number of required buttons to play the game and also fixes an issue I noticed with the super : I managed to trigger a super attack by pressing all three buttons at the same time after the jauges were full. I don't know if there are other ways to trigger it, but in this case, it meant the super attack forced a weapon change and you had to press C again afterwards before going back to the shot type you used beforehand. That won't be a problem anymore with this new button configuration.

As for the plane's visual stance which changes with the weapon change, simply have it be the stance associated with the last weapon used (between the vulcan and the shotgun) and simply have it change at the same time the player uses the weapon that is not associated with the current stance.

-Reflected bullets have the exact same sprite as before. This can very confusing with the small slow purple bullets for instance where it may not be 100% clear that the bullet is not hazardous anymore.

-Are your bosses timed? Dunno if they are and I suppose you already know it, but just in case : they absolutely must time-out after a while. Otherwise, a run can theoretically last forever.

-You clearly have to implement a scoring system. Mere "kills" ain't gonna cut it. A basic scoring system with fixed invariant point values depending on the enemy type could have been enough if you didn't want to have anything too fancy, but the thing is, your weapon system actually has a lot of room for interesting ideas. Enemies killed by supers can yield more points (Given the speed at which jauges recharge during a boss, I would advise against increasing point value for bosses killed this way though), and so can stuff destroyed by reflected bullets. You can keep the "kills" count as an end-of-stage bonus that yields more points the more enemies you killed for example, it doesn't need to be completely ditched. Rewarding more points for enemies killed with a specific weapon is something I would advise against though, as you limit the player freedom when it comes to enjoying the "fun toys" you give them and turns scoring into Simon Says.

Besides, there is one problem your kill count actually alleviates and renders null : boring boss milking. When implementing a scoring system, make sure to avoid having it encourage boss milking. Well, the current boss patterns don't allow for that anyway given that as far as I know, no cannon fodder is spawned during boss fights. But you should keep that in mind if you implement a scoring system.


------


Closing thoughts :

SkyCurser clearly has a lot of potential and I was glad to have tried it out during the Coin-Op Legacy event as it cleared up a bunch of misconceptions and wrong impressions your initial videos gave me. However, it still has a bunch of annoying quirks and is still rough around the edges despite solid core foundation and mechanics.

I wish you good luck for the rest of your project (and especially for the shotgun balancing) and look forward to seeing how you will complete and fine-tune the game in the next few months!

tl;dr :
+ Great graphics
+ Satisfying katana slashes
+ The super system tries to push you towards using all three weapons
- What's a scoring system? What's a score counter? (But this seems to have been fixed)
- Awful unfair Boss instadeath attacks (and all other patterns are piss easy)
- Good luck balancing all three weapons as they have way too many overlapping uses. In the build I played, it was the shotgun that was useless.
- Boss HP is too high

[DejahThoris]

So now that pre-orders have shipped and likely all delivered by now. What's anyone who bought it feeling?

Because I am beyond underwhelmed.

Beyond the general "game isn't finished", and sometimes randomly crashes complaints, I'd like to add that the hardware is almost entirely off-the-shelf PC parts, including the JAMMA adapter.

The game also runs on any PC you plug it into and choose to boot from the USB key. So really, it's not even exclusive to their platform. On the plus side though, it scales up way beyond 240p when played this way and still looks nice. No playing in a tiny 320x240 window.

I guess on the upswing, the art sure is pretty. The game has a lot of good feel to it. The art, sound, and general atmosphere are great. Like M. Knight said, when you slash the katana it's very satisfying.

But the fact that at the end of the day it's just a half-finished Linux game thrown on a self-booting flash-drive shipped with a PC in a plastic project box, quite honestly leaves me disappointed. They like to throw around the word "engineered" a lot, but honestly the only thing custom in the box is their adapter from the J-Pac to the ATX 20-pin connector on the motherboard...

Underwhelmed. That's the word I keep coming back to. That and that I wish I'd been brilliant enough to market a game in a way that forced people to buy PC's from me for them to run it on. Excellent business idea.

[Sumez]

You're being way too nice to it.

[Fudoh]

Do we know what hardware the shipped "PC" consists of ? I'd just be interested to hear what GPU they used to achieve that analogue 240p output.

[DejahThoris]

Do we know what hardware the shipped "PC" consists of ? I'd just be interested to hear what GPU they used to achieve that analogue 240p output.

This is the motherboard:
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product. ... lsrc=aw.ds

APU is an A4-6300
3GB Corsair XMS3 DDR3 1600MHz.
On-board GPU. "Integrated AMD Radeon R7/R5 Series Graphics in A-series APU"

I'd assume it's running CRT_EmuDriver since that's both Linux *and* compatible with R7 and R5 graphics?

[Fudoh]

hmm, indeed. But wouldn't the board (bios/post) boot in 31+khz and only switch to 15khz once Linux is starting up ??

[DejahThoris]

hmm, indeed. But wouldn't the board (bios/post) boot in 31+khz and only switch to 15khz once Linux is starting up ??

That's exactly how it works. The instructions even tell you that a scrambled screen for the first 30-45 seconds is entirely normal when using a 15khz monitor.

Since it also has HDMI out, you can watch the POST/BIOS/boot/etc on the HDMI feed while the picture is scrambled on the 15khz feed out of the JPAC before it's changed res down to 15khz.

[Fudoh]

thanks for confirming!

[DejahThoris]

thanks for confirming!

Edited to add more info while you posted this T_T.

But you're totally welcome .