Thank you all for taking a look at my game!
Special World wrote:I feel as if people here tend to hate health bars, and I mostly agree with that. If there's any way you can redesign the health bar into static chunks (as in Deathsmiles), with each bullet destroying a full chunk, I think that would more clear visually and more satisfying for shooter vets.
So here is where I should mention that there are 5 damage types and there is a resistance stat for each of them. There are upgrade items that buff certain resistances and different bullets do different amounts of damage. The general rule for my game is bigger bullets will do more damage and collision with the boss itself will do the most damage. This means that there is not an exact amount of times that you must get hit before dying. You also unlock the ability to see each bosses' attacks, weaknesses, and resistances. My hope with this is that people will strategize what boss to choose next based on the items they have collected so far.
Edit: after reading around here for a bit I realized that health bars are hated here because they tend to imply that there will be some unavoidable damage. That is not the case in this game at all. It is possible to clear any boss at any level with no damage taken.
Ebbo wrote:Pretty promising stuff considering you made this in just a few months! Before anything else though: I immediately noticed the player ship's movement inertia and while it didn't feel too distracting at first it got kinda awkward once the tensity of patterns started to ramp up. As a rule of thumb inertia is a big no-no in shmups so I'd simply advice removing it completely for a better control.
Yep sounds good I will remove it. I'm not really sure why I had it in there in the first place. I just got so used to it I guess.
Ebbo wrote:
So I managed to clear this after a few tries. Overall I had a pleasant experience yet the game didn't quite manage to keep me captivated the whole way through. While many of the elements feel very polished (especially presentation and music), as a whole they don't really form anything greater than the sum of their parts. Most of the patterns feel rather rudimentary and compounded with the large health pools the bosses begin to overstay their welcome very quickly.
How high of level did the bosses get when you beat the game? I would like to know if the bosses felt more interesting toward the end. For reference, The highest difficulty level for bosses so far is level 10.
I designed the lower levels from 1 to 4 to be very welcoming to newer players. It is possible to keep the difficulty low by choosing the lowest level boss on every stage. You can also let the difficulty rise by choosing the higher level bosses. I was thinking of adding a "hard" mode where the bosses begin at a higher level right from the start.
Ebbo wrote:
I didn't find the rogue-lite elements that interesting either since most of them don't really affect the way you play, simply offering some passive bonuses. Few of them came off almost unbalanced, like Thorns which I managed to get after second boss - the boost in firepower felt quite drastic and the bosses started to go down much quicker. However I did like how some of them were locked behind extra goals, I think you should expand this idea. Some QoL improvements here would be nice: selecting each boss and scrolling through each reward separately gets a bit tiring so I'd appreciate if I could see at a glance what kind of rewards each boss has.
Fair point. A lot of the items are just passives and I'll be on the lookout for inspiration for more interesting power ups. I think all of the 1 star cards are just passives and a few 2 and 3 star cards have the more interesting upgrades. How many of the higher star cards did you get when playing?
I think the most interesting one I have so far is a 2 star card called "tiny wings." It gives you a short range burst of feather shots and it encourages you to get up close to the boss to deal high damage. So I'll definitely be adding more cards like this. Any suggestions are welcome.
Ebbo wrote:
Yet if there is one thing that sort of let me down the most while playing, that would be the premise. There's a lot of potential here. The idea of boss battles representing different anxieties sounds downright brilliant but this theming doesn't really amount to much during gameplay. The bosses are way too uniform in their design to convey much, with similar visual motives and patterns and in the end the story feels almost completely detached from the rest of the game. Simply put the game didn't feel strange enough! You should go all out and really think how to represent your chosen themes through every single facet of your game.
I really like that I'm being encouraged to go even stranger here! So here I assume you are referring to the veyeral bosses (pronounced Viral). I have well over 30 bosses planned for the full game, but right now 4 out of the 8 bosses are those black eyeball things called veyerals. I'm guessing this is what you mean by the bosses being too uniform? Hopefully just adding more of the other types of bosses will improve this. How did you feel about the other bosses especially Roundsaw and Syncron if you fought those?
