Crust Shmup New Anarcho Blast Beat Bullet Hell Game

[crustshmup]

https://imgur.com/a/SMz2UF8
Here's a little preview of a new game I have in development, CRUST SHMUP, an Anarcho Blast Beat Bullet Hell game influenced by the album SCUM by Napalm Death
I'll be releasing it on the 10th of december, still fixing final bugs, will be available on mac and pc

[Safe Crackers]

CRUST SHMUP is now available to play on itch.io

https://safe-crackers.itch.io/crust-shmup

Bleak and brutal, minimal and looping, anti-capitalist anarcho arcade action Inspired by Scum by Napalm Death.

A broken game for a broken society.

Thanks for checking it out.

Peace

[BareKnuckleRoo]

1) Spacebar is generally not good to use for a shoot button as it results in what's called ghosting (where the keyboard doesn't properly register multiple keypresses together) and thus you can't move diagonally up-left when holding spacebar unless you're playing on a gaming keyboard with anti-ghosting features. This is why a lot of doujin arcade games use the Z key and X keys for shot and bomb rather than Spacebar. Making controls configurable also helps avoid this. For a test of if your keyboard does this, see here: https://www.microsoft.com/applied-scien ... sting-demo

2) Movement appears to have inertia to it; you don't stop moving for several frames and will keep sliding long after you lift the arrow key up.

3) Diagonal movement is extremely unresponsive. You can quickly move left then right and up then down, but any attempts at moving in a diagonal causes extremely sluggish movement. Effectively the only way to play this is without diagonals. This, combined with the massive sliding inertia on movement, essentially means the game is in an unplayable state.

4) Enemy bullets move far faster than you can realistically dodge or react to them, meaning the only way to progress is to try and minimize damage taken and hope to make it to the end of the level (which appears to heal you). Moving to the side of the screen to avoid enemies is strategically better than trying to fight everything sometimes. The controls are not precise enough to allow for any really tight or precise dodging (things which epitomize bullet hell/danmaku games).

5) Levels appear to end very abruptly.

6) I'm not sure where player health is communicated, is it the ship color or something?

7) Ammunition for your one and only main gun means the levels are very much memorizer in nature rather than a sit back and blast everything kind of vibe. Powerups and 1ups are based on beating the levels with over 1/2 ammo or never shooting. It's an incredibly strange design choice. I'm not even sure if 1UPs work properly or not, I seem to remember getting a gameover even with two stocked.

8) Hit detection on enemies is extremely weird, like shots will sometimes just go right through them.

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The best part of this game, although I'm not sure it can be accurately called that in this state, are the blog posts on the game page. I think any reader will understand what to expect when they read them:

Considering all this, we spent a few hours making some minor tweaks to bullet patterns and enemy hit points, and some rearrangements in the level designs. Addressing potential balance issues, yes - but careful not to nerf or nullify the true nature of the experience. Or spend too long in the process. We decided that our time would be best spent painting the games logo onto a bedspread that would be gaffer taped to the wall. Whilst it was drying we went to get a drink at a local barcade, which I had been wanting to visit for a while.

The weirdo game in this particular venue was one of those mega wide screen Darius Bursts. It’s always struck me how shit the power ups look in that game compared to how incredible everything else looks. You’ve got these 3ft long robot fish that look amazing and then these totally basic colored balls for power ups.

[Safe Crackers]

Thank you for taking the time to play the game, read the Devlogs and give very detailed feedback. Really appreciate it.
Peace