Thanks, lilmanjs! We are hoping that Duality: ZF will give a chance for 360 owners to play shooters again! It's been so long. I feel like the last time I played fun shooters was on the Sega Genesis. As for the 360, I have downloaded and played Ikaruga and 1942, the only choices available to me that I know of. Ikaruga is awesome and innovative, but still lacks the "power up" aspect I love so much in shooters. Not a flaw, just a design choice. Just means there's room for our game. And 1942 is basically boring.lilmanjs wrote:this game looks amazing and my sister has a 360. how cool is that? I love the art style of this game.
I was disappointed. Thank you.Kaspal wrote:whenever its available for purchase, i think im gonna buy it... i like the concept of controlling 2 ships at once. nice work there m8.
If anyone knows why the quality of this video is so much lower than our previous video, let me know. The quality completely sucks. Please click "watch in high quality" below the video to watch it as intended. "normal quality" should have been good enough, but, for some reason, it isn't. Perhaps it is the length of the video (almost 4 minutes long) that degraded the quality?Matthew Doucette wrote:Duality: ZF October 2008 Tech Demo:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h46y0N9nUec
| My games - http://www.emphatic.seRegalSin wrote:Street Fighters. We need to aviod them when we activate time accellerator.
We scroll because we want the player to feel as though she's a part of a larger world, as it makes the game more immersive. You don't feel as though you're just pasted images on top of an irrelevant scrolling backdrop. Games like Raiden and Thunder Force II have scrolling perpendicular to the motion of the level, and it makes it them more immersive, since the camera responds to the player. We want this feeling conveyed in our game.emphatic wrote:...isn't the visible area enough without the scrolling to the sides? I think the gameplay would benefit from not scrolling to the sides (i.e. instead use "fixed" scrolling) If the game had a vertical alignment, I would understand this decision, but now it's super-wide...
Both. The diagonals go full speed in both x,y (i.e. you move faster than just moving in x or just moving in y) so that you don't feel a slow down when trying to avoid bullets by rolling around them. With analog control, you can go in any direction, not just 8, and these are mapped to a square, not a sphere, so you still get full speed in the diagonals. And, you can move half speed, if required, or any proportion between 0 and full speed.emphatic wrote:Is it digital or analogue control for the ships?
| My games - http://www.emphatic.seRegalSin wrote:Street Fighters. We need to aviod them when we activate time accellerator.
Incidentally, we tried scrolling like Thunder Force II does, where the camera is positioned based on the ship -- that is, it moves up and down immediately to the motion of the ship, which really makes it immersive. And it's great. We even added it in the 2nd dimension, as well, to make it even more immersive.Jason wrote:We scroll because we want the player to feel as though she's a part of a larger world, as it makes the game more immersive. You don't feel as though you're just pasted images on top of an irrelevant scrolling backdrop. Games like Raiden and Thunder Force II have scrolling perpendicular to the motion of the level, and it makes it them more immersive, since the camera responds to the player. We want this feeling conveyed in our game.emphatic wrote:...isn't the visible area enough without the scrolling to the sides? I think the gameplay would benefit from not scrolling to the sides (i.e. instead use "fixed" scrolling) If the game had a vertical alignment, I would understand this decision, but now it's super-wide...
Thanks for the explanation, I wasn't sure what you meant by vertical alignment, either. I thought you were referring to an attribute of the camera's motion.
We are interested in your thoughts on how to achieve that, or if we're close at all.
What do you mean? Galaga is aged? It's fresh as hell compared to most euroshmups. I played Galaga 88 last night and really enjoyed it. But the original is just as fun.Jason wrote:Please keep in mind if there were no side-to-side scrolling, the game starts to look aged like Galaga.
If the code change is that easy to do, you should include an "old school" or "arcade" version of the game (edit: without the scrolling) as well as your immersed game.Jason wrote:As soon as there is scrolling, the game feels like it comes alive with immersiveness.
This is a very quick change in the code for us to test, so we've looked at it both ways. But, feeling as you do, we don't want too much scrolling, since it may ruin the experience, so we made the world only slightly larger than a 16:9 TV screen, to minimize it.
| My games - http://www.emphatic.seRegalSin wrote:Street Fighters. We need to aviod them when we activate time accellerator.
It has nothing to do with Galaga not being fresh or fun. Lots of old school games are fun. It's about the feeling of immersion. I am not sure how else to explain it. When you separate the camera from the background, and allow the background to move, it helps achieve the feeling we want. A great example of this is our TI-99/4A's version of Pole Position, where the road is static, and the player car moves across the screen instead. This was much less immersive than most Pole Position ports and the original arcade, where the road scrolls and moves across the screen. With a 2d shooter, we want something in between. The point is, when the background is STUCK to the screen, unmoving, it gives a pasted on feeling. I still remember playing Thunder Force II, level 2, for the first time. The game FELT amazing. And we want that feeling in our game. As Jason has explained, the exact Thunder Force II style scroll was impossible to achieve witih 2 or more players, but we came up with a nice compromise.emphatic wrote:What do you mean? Galaga is aged? It's fresh as hell compared to most euroshmups. I played Galaga 88 last night and really enjoyed it. But the original is just as fun.Jason wrote:Please keep in mind if there were no side-to-side scrolling, the game starts to look aged like Galaga.
The amount of space or real estate was not the factor in deciding to implement left-right scrolling. Now I see why I could not derive your meaning of "vertical alignment" in the context. You are right, a vertically aligned game that uses left-right scrolling benefits from additional space, where as we have a 16:9 aspect ratio with tons of space already, but we still want to scroll anyway, based on the feeling I explained in my previous post.emphatic wrote:It looks very nice, although, isn't the visible area enough without the scrolling to the sides? I think the gameplay would benefit from not scrolling to the sides (i.e. instead use "fixed" scrolling) If the game had a vertical alignment, I would understand this desicion, but now it's super-wide...
Thanks!Matthew Doucette wrote:This is the most unexpected idea we have heard, so far, that the game may benefit from NO scrolling. I am interested to hear more of your thoughts... and I appreciate them all.
Just so we're clear, I DO want the game to scroll "upwards" but not controlled by the players movement. The moving of the camera/screen from side to side as to where the players' ships are on the screen, I'm all for. It's aimed at a widescreen audience after all. | My games - http://www.emphatic.seRegalSin wrote:Street Fighters. We need to aviod them when we activate time accellerator.
As TF2 is from 1988 it's hardly new. Perphaps it's as simple as that. I haven't played it myself since I'm more into arcade titles than console ones.Matthew Doucette wrote:I know we are new here, but I am not understanding a lot of these posts!MX7 wrote:Jason wrote:
newer games
Thunder Force II
| My games - http://www.emphatic.seRegalSin wrote:Street Fighters. We need to aviod them when we activate time accellerator.
Right now we do the typical auto-scroll upwards, but also allow it to scroll up-down slightly due to player movements. You cannot prevent the auto-scroll, nor can you speed it up. You can see this in our videos. I am not 100% sure about it, as it has pros and cons.emphatic wrote:Thanks!
Well, we want to ensure we are not blinded by our love! Ultimately, the hard decisions in a game design are those that are never completely right or wrong, but instead compromises. Finding the right balance is what's hard.emphatic wrote:Matthew Doucette wrote:I understand now what you mean by "immersed" into the game. And since I (the more I read your posts) come to understand that you're doing this out of love for the feeling you did get from a specific game (TF2), so be it. Do it the way you love it, and I'm sure others will "get" it as well.
He's just poking fun, because he's missing the point, and believes I'm saying Thunder Force II is a new game. What I actually said was that Galaga (while a fun game) didn't have the immersiveness that most newer games had, making it appear aged. Thunder Force II, while not the newest game, but being at least two generations newer than Galaga with its parallax scrolling background, is still one of the most immersive games. Even newer games like the remake of 1942 are not as immersive as Thunder Force II, which shows that the date of the game is actually irrelevant.Matthew Doucette wrote:I know we are new here, but I am not understanding a lot of these posts!MX7 wrote:Jason wrote:
newer games
Thunder Force II
True. I was disappointed when Thunder Force III did not have the immersion Thunder Force II had... and most new games do not. I can not think of any off hand.Jason wrote: Thunder Force II, while not the newest game, but being at least two generations newer than Galaga with its parallax scrolling background, is still one of the most immersive games. Even newer games like the remake of 1942 are not as immersive as Thunder Force II, which shows that the date of the game is actually irrelevant.
When I first played TF2, it was amazing. People were commenting that it looked 3D, and it was just 2D. It was just that immersive. It really felt like I was playing an arcade board, even though it was just the Sega Genesis. (Keep in mind only the side-scrolling levels are decent, the overheard multi-direction ones are horrid.)emphatic wrote:As TF2 is from 1988 it's hardly new. Perhaps it's as simple as that. I haven't played it myself since I'm more into arcade titles than console ones.
So perhaps you should tell the kind people here more about your gaming experience and such. What are your favourite games? Are you familiar with modern game makers such as CAVE, Psikyo and Raizing? If not, you're missing out on some good stuff.
Keep in mind, we're not trying to make a bullet hell shooter. We want something like an enhanced Raiden. Perhaps it could be considered bullet hell, but we don't want a 1x1 pixel hit box. We have 8x8 pixel hit box and that's good enough. We don't want defenses for when you can't traverse the bullet field. We want all enemy bullet patterns to be navigatable. This is what we are shooting for. 
