Avenge Us / Geomagnetic Storm / Vertscroller

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Sai'ke
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Avenge Us / Geomagnetic Storm / Vertscroller

Post by Sai'ke »

Using this thread to post some semi-regular updates on progress on Avenge Us. A shmup that I've been developing for the past few years in C++/OpenGL.
The main game plays out over a galaxy map. There is a limited number of stages per game. As time progresses, worlds will fall. The idea is to gather allies to obtain new weaponry and abilities to go into the final battle. It will not be possible to save everyone and therefore you have to decide which levels to tackle before going for that final stage to square off with the bulk of the enemy fleet.

The plan is to, in principle, make it possible to beat the final stage right out of the gate with no upgrades, but then it will be very hard.

Aside from the story mode, I plan to make a warning-forever-style onslaught mode, as a secondary mode meant for quick games of some instant action. Here's an example of what these bosses look like:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcr2lKWNxn8

Some of the music I've been workin' on.
https://soundcloud.com/saike/side-by-side
https://soundcloud.com/saike/one-last-push
https://soundcloud.com/saike/where-is-i ... eakpoint-1

Added some GIFs:
Image
Use the bullet time sparingly, and you can save up charge for special attacks. The boss is a procedurally generated boss from onslaught mode.

Image
Test of some early popcorn.

Image
Kapow! Tank explodes :)
Better quality: https://giphy.com/gifs/1AHDJX5hjHd5fWjpa0/html5

Image
Early boss concept (one of the attacks in his second stage after he loses his extremities).

https://i.imgur.com/GR3buTf.gifv
Test of the volumetric light system :)

Test of some planetary backgrounds:
https://i.imgur.com/fDhybq2.mp4
https://i.imgur.com/101F4sK.mp4

Some full-res shots of the procedural planets where the action will take place :)
Spoiler
Image
Spoiler
Image
Spoiler
Image
Others here (but be warned, some of the backstory is in the captions there): https://imgur.com/a/keoCR

If you're interested, I've started a subreddit for the game's development.
https://i.reddit.com/r/avengeus
Last edited by Sai'ke on Wed Apr 04, 2018 11:08 am, edited 14 times in total.
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M.Knight
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Re: Avenge Us

Post by M.Knight »

Hi! And congrats on creating your own engine!
Here are some comments I have, based on the videos :

-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.
-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.
-The flame effect looks...uncanny.
-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.
-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.
-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.
-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.
-The music track would IMO fit a stage better than a boss, as it takes a lot of time before really picking up.


Good luck with your game!
RegalSin wrote: I think I have downloaded so much I am bored with downloading. No really I bored with downloading stuff I might consider moving to Canada or the pacific.
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Sai'ke
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Re: Avenge Us

Post by Sai'ke »

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! :)
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Re: Avenge Us

Post by M.Knight »

With the switch to verical orientation, the player and the enemies look much more at home now!
The difference between those two styles is not just in the visuals, so it is possible that some enemy patterns will be more/less natural to dodge.

What makes the flame effects look odd to me is that they clash a lot with the rest of the effects' style. It is the same kind of feeling as when someone hastily adds flame effects on a video that originally had none. I can't say for sure what's the exact reason, but if I had to pinpoint something, I would say it's due to the difference in terms of outlines. The other effects have a core, most of the time white, surrounded by the effect's actual color in a gradient pattern. The further away from the core the less pronounced the color is, so the effect's outlines seamlessly blend in with the background.

The flames look different. They have strong outlines and do not blend as well. I took a screenshot of the boss video to show how strong the contrast between the explosion and the background can get :
Spoiler
Image
You'll notice that even with the distorsion filter applied to the scene due to the player getting hit, the other effects are still well integrated to the scene, while the fire is not.
RegalSin wrote: I think I have downloaded so much I am bored with downloading. No really I bored with downloading stuff I might consider moving to Canada or the pacific.
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Sai'ke
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Re: Avenge Us

Post by Sai'ke »

I see what you mean now and I agree that it looks weird.
I think that the extinction law that I picked for smoke absorbed way too much light. In reality it should be more towards exponential, while mine was linear.

I changed it to an approximation of exponential absorption and also added the fire to the radiosity (self glow) layer to try blend it a bit more. It may need some more tweaking in the future, but I think it stands out a lot less already.

For comparison sake:
https://i.imgur.com/gq3e6m0.png

Thanks for the keen observation. Helps a lot! :)
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Re: Avenge Us

Post by Sai'ke »

It's been a productive weekend. Made a system for the boss brain to keep track of the state of its components. Now, the procedural bosses are very briefly phased by an attack with a supercharged weapon and will start to use more aggressive core-centered weapons once all its turrets have been destroyed. I'll also use this in the main game to make the boss appear a bit more adaptive.

Also revised some of the particle system offloading a bit more of the workload to the GPU and modified the edge accentuation shaders a little such that bullets are always visible even when an area of the screen is saturated with light and fluid. Finally, also made another tune for the shmup:
https://soundcloud.com/saike/one-last-push

In the game you have one charge meter. You can use it to go into bullet time (for a short while), or save up for one big blast of one of the super-weapons (your ship only holds one at a time). Spend charge on bullet time or save up for a bigger attack? That's the question.
Image
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Re: Avenge Us / Geomagnetic Storm

Post by Sai'ke »

I did a little write up on how the planets for the game are generated for those interested. Technical details here: https://www.reddit.com/r/avengeus/comme ... _universe/

For some reason it won't let me embed, so here's the link, if you want to see the various stages in motion:
https://i.imgur.com/AkhJKEU.gifv

The plan is to have different home-worlds which you can save. You have to choose though, the enemy hordes are advancing and you probably can't save them all.
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Re: Avenge Us / Geomagnetic Storm

Post by Sai'ke »

Worked some more on the explosions. Trying to get them out of that uncanny valley.
Image
Better quality: https://giphy.com/gifs/3019wFkTwoBtavtWdv/html5

Also been working on telegraphing better when heavier or stronger attacks can be expected (these are tanks).
Image
Better quality: https://giphy.com/gifs/1AHDJX5hjHd5fWjpa0/html5
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Re: Avenge Us / Geomagnetic Storm

Post by M.Knight »

The explosion effect in the second gif looks much better than the one in the first videos if you ask me. :)
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Re: Avenge Us / Geomagnetic Storm

Post by Sai'ke »

If you're curious what those enemies sound and look like at full framerate:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drTa4bXEzm4

I don't know why, but my gifs and h264's always turn out terrible. It's a real issue for me on twitter. If anyone has any advice on how to get better video quality on twitter, I'd be very happy to hear it. I often see decent quality videos, yet mine always turn into a blurry mush.
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Re: Avenge Us / Geomagnetic Storm

Post by M.Knight »

The player shot's sound effect is a bit too strong IMO. It drowns the music and would also be more fitting for a seldomly-used assault rifle in an FPS than the main weapon of a shmup. The shot SFX is one you are going to hear a lot - if not always - during the game so while it is important to have one that sounds powerful, it shouldn't be too loud nor too brutal on the ears. Otherwise, long sessions can become grating. :wink:

As for gifs, I have similar issues to yours. Are the videos directly uploaded on twitter or are you using links to external, dedicated websites like gfycat or streamable? Maybe that can improve the video quality?
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Re: Avenge Us / Geomagnetic Storm

Post by Sai'ke »

Yeah, agreed. I got over-excited. It still needs balancing of levels. :D

I've tried both, neither turned out very good. I've tried
GIF => Twitter
GIF => Imgur
GIF => gfycat

which was all kinda murky. Then I tried
MP4 => Twitter
MP4 => Imgur
MP4 => gfycat

The second MP4 option looked best, but didn't autoplay on twitter. Uploading directly to twitter autoplayed but looked mushy.

Did another tune too: https://soundcloud.com/saike/side-by-side
I'm currently working on an extension of my REAPER plugin (music program) to come up with more interesting chord progressions. Also invested in Shreddage2, to hopefully have access to some better guitars: https://github.com/JoepVanlier/Hackey-Trackey

Welp. That's it for now.
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Re: Avenge Us / Geomagnetic Storm

Post by M.Knight »

That's a pretty nice track you've got there! It evolves a bit and gives off the vibe of a tense mission. Would feel right at home in a rather difficult level with plenty of stuff happening.
I would only remove the "maracas" instruments that play in the background from 1:05 to 1:30 and from 2:45 to 3:15; they clash with the rest of the music and don't fit IMO.
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Re: Avenge Us / Geomagnetic Storm

Post by Sai'ke »

Ah yes. I'm also not super happy with the drums in that section yet. By maracas sound you mean the hihat-like sound, right? It's a gameboy hihat actually. Thanks for the feedback! :D

Just for fun, I tried to have the player fly closer to a planet to give the illusion of being near the surface. Should probably cast a shadow too when getting closer. Note sure if I like it yet though.
https://i.imgur.com/fDhybq2.mp4
https://i.imgur.com/101F4sK.mp4
Not sure yet though. If I will go this route, I'll make sure to make a separate system for these backgrounds, so that I can render them in higher resolution.

Also extended my REAPER plugin for coming up with better chord progressions. Decided to open source this tool too :)
https://i.imgur.com/p2MGQTB.png

Took it for a quick spin on the weekend as well.
https://soundcloud.com/saike/potatopoop/s-AytMN
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Re: Avenge Us / Geomagnetic Storm / Vertscroller

Post by M.Knight »

Yup, I was indeed talking about the hit-hat sound. I had no idea it came from a gameboy!

The player hovering above the surface of the planet reminds me a lot of Judgement Silversword, that's pretty cool.
I just noticed that the shots can be very flashy in comparison with the player. Be careful not to drown the player ship under the effects, as that would make bullet dodging artificially harder. This mostly happens with the default forward shot.

That short track is quite good for something you made so quickly! I suppose it sounds a bit more "retro game console"-like than what you would want for the game?
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Re: Avenge Us / Geomagnetic Storm / Vertscroller

Post by Sai'ke »

Thanks. I will remove it in the next render.

This weekend I've been toning down all the flashing effects. Basically, all non-bullets cannot exceed above a certain luminance limit now (they additively blend up to that limit). I've also made the lighting on most player bullets less strong and increased the size of the indicators which indicate where enemies will spawn.

You are right, I've been ignoring readability too much. As a test, I did some procedural levels. These are not great and not going to be in the game, but they are good for me as a dev, because then I don't know where to expect enemies and therefore have to rely on whatever cues the game is giving me. Needless to say, I sucked :D

It's my first game with glitzy effects (previous ones were pretty bland), so I'll need some time to get to grips with it all :)

In other news, I made a new tune. It's for a boss fight. It's relatively slow, but heavy. The boss I am envisioning is not a fast mover, but he has considerable firepower compared to other bosses in the game:
https://soundcloud.com/saike/squaring-o ... e-hyokudan

If you like backstories:
Spoiler
In the game there will be a mission that you do for the Hyokudan, a fearless and evil species who subjugate and enslave any species that stand in their way. As player, you are trying to get them allied against a bigger foe (the game's main enemy). At the end of that mission, you in principle have their aid in the bag, but you get the chance to attack their mother ship. Destroying the boss, will free the enslaved creatures and rally them to your side (they are less strong than having the Hyokudan on your side though). Failing to destroy the boss (because you run out of time) loses both allies. Not destroying the boss provides you with the Hyokudan and their slave army but leaves you morally bankrupt.

After the game finishes, a lot of these conditions will resolve. If you left the Hyokudan leader alive, he will take over the galaxy after you are gone. You've saved life in the galaxy, but at a terrible cost.
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Re: Avenge Us / Geomagnetic Storm / Vertscroller

Post by Sai'ke »

Working on some more boring stuff. Working on an editor where I can quickly design more complex formations for larger groups of popcorn enemies. I can now setup polygons, and attach ships to these polygons, then I can copy and move/deform/rotate them and the splines will be generated accordingly. Color indicates time.

The next step will be to implement something that lets me test waves very quickly. Jumping in at the press of a button and then tweaking it rapidly.

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Re: Avenge Us / Geomagnetic Storm / Vertscroller

Post by Sai'ke »

I'm really doubting what aspect ratio to go with.

3:4 sounds appealing because it allows people to tate it, and it feels pretty claustrophobic which helps heighten the tension. I like the feeling of a vert, because it feels more like stuff is coming at you, and the tunneliness of it heightens the tension for me. It does mean that pretty much nobody has a fullscreen experience however and that for most people (most people probably won't tate), it'd be a relatively small playing area. Small means I am pretty limited in the amount of detail on the art as well. This is what I am currently working with actually, but I notice that I am pretty limited in doing bigger nice looking formations of popcorn enemies.
16:9 or 9:16 is nice only for the full screen experience. 16:9 would really make me do a much wider type of game though. Would probably force me to make ground units, walls or stuff like that to force the player into a more confined area, and I wasn't really planning on doing this.
1:1, might be a decent tradeoff and I noticed that Choren Sha 68k does this, and I quite like the feel of that game.
4:3, might also be a good tradeoff. Bit wider, bit more screen usage.

I mean, for all of these I can make sure that here are very subtle non-distracting animations in the dead space, but it'd still be a lot of space left unused.

Is there anyone with more experience than me who can give me some advice in this?
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Re: Avenge Us / Geomagnetic Storm / Vertscroller

Post by M.Knight »

For a vertical shmup, I think 3:4 would be preferable for the reasons you explained. If TATE is too much of a pain to implement or if you worry about people who can't TATE, then 1:1 is fine too, even if you don't have the same kind of vertical space to react to stuff coming at you.

4:3 can work but you'll start noticing some impact on your level design and your weapon range. Because the screen gets wider, narrow shots feel even narrower so you'll have to make adjustements. Besides, you may have more enemies spawning from the sides than the previous formats. There are some great 4:3 games such as Mars Matrix so it can still work, obviously.

16:9 / 9:16 is where I would draw the line and say no. 16:9 for a vertical is way too wide. Jamestown features it but it mostly works due to the 4-player aspect. As for 9:16, it sounds cool in theory but the people who don't TATE will get a very tiny playable area on their screen.

If you need to feel how those formats play, I also suggest trying out a few shmups with these aspect ratios if you can. Nothing beats the hands-on experience. :wink:
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Re: Avenge Us / Geomagnetic Storm / Vertscroller

Post by Shepardus »

IIRC Cho Ren Sha 68k is actually 512x480, but that's close enough to 1:1.

Agree that 9:16 is too tall if you care at all about people not playing on a vertical monitor, but it's fine, even preferable, for smartphone releases. 16:9 is fine for horizontal shooters but may be too wide for a vert. It depends on how effectively you can use that space, though. Some examples you can refer to are Jamestown, Astebreed (the vertical parts of it at least), and Terra Feminarum.
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Re: Avenge Us / Geomagnetic Storm / Vertscroller

Post by ciox »

Most games are around 1:1 anyway because of the side to side scrolling they employ, the total gameplay area is either square or close to it if you were to measure it, so it's not a terrible departure to use a 1:1 or at most 4:3 aspect ratio.
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Re: Avenge Us / Geomagnetic Storm / Vertscroller

Post by Sai'ke »

M.Knight wrote:For a vertical shmup, I think 3:4 would be preferable for the reasons you explained. If TATE is too much of a pain to implement or if you worry about people who can't TATE, then 1:1 is fine too, even if you don't have the same kind of vertical space to react to stuff coming at you.

4:3 can work but you'll start noticing some impact on your level design and your weapon range. Because the screen gets wider, narrow shots feel even narrower so you'll have to make adjustements. Besides, you may have more enemies spawning from the sides than the previous formats. There are some great 4:3 games such as Mars Matrix so it can still work, obviously.

16:9 / 9:16 is where I would draw the line and say no. 16:9 for a vertical is way too wide. Jamestown features it but it mostly works due to the 4-player aspect. As for 9:16, it sounds cool in theory but the people who don't TATE will get a very tiny playable area on their screen.

If you need to feel how those formats play, I also suggest trying out a few shmups with these aspect ratios if you can. Nothing beats the hands-on experience. :wink:
Yeah, I should play a few more and I will. I'm setting aside a few hours every week to explore how others deal with this. I mean, I've played many before, but playing normally is a bit different from studying why they work. Allowing a tate mode is pretty easy in the way I have my code set up, but most monitors don't allow tilting, so most people would be forced to play it with huge chunks of the screen unused.

I hadn't considered how the narrow shots would feel even more narrow with wider screens. That's a good one actually. May have to add some spread if I go that route.
Shepardus wrote:IIRC Cho Ren Sha 68k is actually 512x480, but that's close enough to 1:1.

Agree that 9:16 is too tall if you care at all about people not playing on a vertical monitor, but it's fine, even preferable, for smartphone releases. 16:9 is fine for horizontal shooters but may be too wide for a vert. It depends on how effectively you can use that space, though. Some examples you can refer to are Jamestown, Astebreed (the vertical parts of it at least), and Terra Feminarum.
Ah, really. My bad. I only very roughly estimated it by eyeballing it. Jamestown I've beaten, but I'll check out those other two, thanks! I also notice Jamestown makes a lot of use of ground units. I'm only targeting desktop pc's for now, since phones would melt under the load I think.
ciox wrote:Most games are around 1:1 anyway because of the side to side scrolling they employ, the total gameplay area is either square or close to it if you were to measure it, so it's not a terrible departure to use a 1:1 or at most 4:3 aspect ratio.
I'm mostly doubting between 1:1 or 4:3. I guess I will have to make a few waves, and see what works. I think I should probably try to make a full stage and get some input :)

Thanks for the help guys! :)
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Re: Avenge Us / Geomagnetic Storm / Vertscroller

Post by Sai'ke »

New tune. Don't read the description if you don't want to be spoiled:
https://soundcloud.com/saike/missing-in-action

Other than that, some more semi-boring work on the editor:
https://i.imgur.com/RKLAMoS.mp4

Hopefully some more interesting stuff to come after I get this stuff over with :?
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Re: Avenge Us / Geomagnetic Storm / Vertscroller

Post by M.Knight »

The track sounds good but the voice clip at the end feels a bit cheesy to me. Maybe it works better in-game?
In any case, if the game's structure implies that you are going to replay the same stages to get higher scores or for plain survival, keep that in mind, as the impact of the voice clip may not be as strong as the first time you play, and maybe it can even end up a bit annoying.
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Re: Avenge Us / Geomagnetic Storm / Vertscroller

Post by Sai'ke »

M.Knight wrote:The track sounds good but the voice clip at the end feels a bit cheesy to me. Maybe it works better in-game?
In any case, if the game's structure implies that you are going to replay the same stages to get higher scores or for plain survival, keep that in mind, as the impact of the voice clip may not be as strong as the first time you play, and maybe it can even end up a bit annoying.
Yeah, agreed. After listening it back for a few times I see your point :D
I don't know yet how it'll work. I haven't made that stage yet. Maybe I'll leave the sound clip out, we'll see. :)
I was thinking of having a stage mode and a story mode anyway, and dumping all the story stuff when you just want to play stages.

I don't have much new to show in terms of stages or anything, as I've still been working on an in-game editor to get a quicker cycle for testing waves and fine tuning them until they play right.

That said, I did play around with tweaking the explosions of the procedural bosses a bit today, which was fun :D
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ir6rRxiOjQw

And a bit slower:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dcYugtcGDM

Made it a bit more physical. Before, the boss was static as it was exploding. It looked kind of weird. Now, the system simulates the effect of gas which combust out of the chunks, and push them away from where they used to be attached. I think it looks a bit more physical this way.

Note that the player will be invulnerable while the boss is exploding, so the visual overload should hopefully be OK.

I may or may not add a slow-mo effect to it as well. Also not sure whether to go with the faster one, or the one that takes a bit longer :)
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M.Knight
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Re: Avenge Us / Geomagnetic Storm / Vertscroller

Post by M.Knight »

Being able to quickly set up and test waves is very important! :) A faster workflow means you'll be able to iterate on your level design and improve it much faster. Also, if it is a pain in the ass to tweak a setting, you might be tempted not to tweak it even if the game would have benefited from that.

As for the explosions, I prefer the slower version. The other one is too fast to really process the dramatic impact a boss explosion should convey.
Also, why not save the boss' core for last when destroying the parts? Having a bunch of small parts exploding at the end can look anticlimatic, while having the boss lose each one of its smaller parts and then have its core explode in a dramatic fashion is a lot of fun.

Take a look at those clips to see what I mean :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIxKjmrCrS4&t=7m08s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SA14X_3ggQ4&t=7m10s
RegalSin wrote: I think I have downloaded so much I am bored with downloading. No really I bored with downloading stuff I might consider moving to Canada or the pacific.
Remote Weapon GunFencer - My shmup project
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