I will be relying on you guys

[fredrikpj]

Watching those shots hit the enemies and they never explode is like torture for me.

Please make them blow up.

Oh no worries there, making enemies blow up is what I've been looking forward to for the last 30 hours of programming hehe

[ForeverSublime]

Things I found to be fun:
- Hitpoints, I hate when you get shot once and you're dead. A simple three hitpoint system is what I prefer (this could be changed with difficulty setting, 1 hit for expert, 3 for normal, 5 for beginner etc.)
- Currency, like in blood money that you collect money to use in stores.

These are about the two worst ideas you can put into a shmup. Please don't say you love cut scenes as well...

If you want to make a great game, look at ARCADE games.

Bah, I present you "Guwange" and "Forgotten Worlds" respectively. It's all in the execution. Life bars are easy - anyone that wants to play without getting hit can still play that way.

Fredrik, It's good to see you do what you love. You appear to be a really talented guy. You can trust in everyone else, but you can only count on yourself. Your vision sounds reasonable enough.

[monkeyman]

Really, I don't see what the problem is with healthbars in shmups.

[Udderdude]

It depends on how they're implemented, but in general they just encourage lazyness and bullet barf patterns that can't be dodged w/o getting hit a few times.

[fredrikpj]

I've updated my bullet engine a bit and I'm soon finished with that part, just missing some small programming stuff that will make my life easier.
I've added a dust layer that I can turn on/off with a timer (having it on all the time affects performance drastically).
Also added a waypoint system that lets particles follow a path. And finally I've added gravitywell support, nice if you want enemies/bullets to avoid/attract areas. There are tons of other stuff I've added, but I'll focus on showing these for now..

Here's a demo:
http://www.flashbutler.com/projectile.html

You can click anywhere to add a waypoint, the red circle following your mouse is a gravitywell that pushes particles from it.
Also, If you add more than 256 waypoints the particles will stop (doesn't support more than 256 points per waypoint path).

Mind the performance is affected now because I'm using the dustlayer all the time, normally it should sit nicely around 60 fps with it turned off.

[Sasupoika]

That is... beautiful. Keep up awesome work!
Anyway; about the healthbars. I found them pretty annoying, especially when you have a big hitbox. If you want healthbars, there are two musts:

1. NO PUSH-BACK. Give some immunity-time too after getting hit.
2. Not too much health. No undodgeable bullets. No bullet-barfs.

And about currency; if you are making a game with traditional arcade-design, it should not take too long to operate menus. But do not use currency as score.
Using your score to buy stuff sucks. Few ideas:

1. After reaching certain score, you are allowed to upgrade ship to some extend.
2. Or there is currency, which is seperate value from score. As simple as that.