Hey, many thanks for the detailed comments. They're quite helpful.
M.Knight wrote:-The perspective is a bit odd. The player ship and the enemies look like they originally belonged to a vertical game but were rotated 90°. That is due to them having a top-down orientation. Horizontal shmups usually have a side-view (or variation thereof) of their game elements.
I have swapped the orientation today and went from widescreen aspect ratio to 4:3 (4 being the height in this case). It does indeed feel a lot more natural.
M.Knight wrote:-Be careful with the visual effects! They are pretty, that's for sure, and a bunch of pleasant explosions is always a good thing in shmups but they must never intefere with the game's lisibility. Some of the effects can blend in with the bullets and cause surprise life losses.
Yeah, this is a concern I share. I have since added a system which highlights edges of all colliders whenever the lighting in the vicinity is too busy. It seems to improve things a bit, but it still needs a lot of tweaking for sure.
https://twitter.com/twitter/statuses/962462681600020480
M.Knight wrote:-The flame effect looks...uncanny.
What do you mean? Do you think it looks bad? Do you have an idea on how to make it look better?
M.Knight wrote:-It should be made clearer what is dangerous, what is helpful and what is simply eye-candy. At first, I thought the green smoke was either some sort of energy you can collect or suicide bullets you had to dodge. Turns out it does nothing.
Yes. Actually, originally, I was going to make the green stuff (which is actually the ship you just shot fragmented) collectible and tradeable for weapons between levels. After a while this got much too messy however, with scrap floating around in the fluid everywhere. I then decided to make the scrap disappear relatively fast. I did still like the visual aesthetic of the green glowy scrap, therefore I kept it, but if it is indeed too much visual noise, it may be better to scrap it. Or maybe just get rid of the glow.
M.Knight wrote:-The screenshake when some heavy weapons hit the enemy is visually distracting. Have at least a toggle to disable any kind of screen shake effect if it also affects the actual game elements and not just the background. Screenshaking and other crazy effects when dying or game overing is more acceptable as you don't have control over your player at that moment.
Yeah, I fully agree. It's really tempting to overuse it. I will make a toggle in the options menu to disable it entirely, and will use it more sparingly. Maybe only when the player dies or uses a superweapon (this grants him temporary invincibility anyway).
M.Knight wrote:-Enemies shouldn't be able to fire at you if they are at the very left of the screen, as they either point blank you or force you to move on the right side without any way to actually hit them.
Yeah. This does need tweaking.
M.Knight wrote:-The boss part destruction system looks pretty good, however the bosses feel anticlimatic towards the end if they don't compensate the destroyed parts in their patterns in any way when reduced to a core.
Thanks! That boss is actually not a proper boss. It's a system I wrote to quickly generate and rig skeletons for bosses. I plan to script the actual bosses in the game by hand. I was thinking of relegating the procedural bosses to a separate onslaught/survival gamemode though. In that case, I will heed your advice and make sure that when the external weapons are mostly destroyed, he will switch to some different set of core weapons.
M.Knight wrote:-The music track would IMO fit a stage better than a boss, as it takes a lot of time before really picking up.
Noted.
M.Knight wrote:Good luck with your game!
Thanks! I will need it!