Hydorah - indie shooter that actually does things right

[Obiwanshinobi]

I like the flight control lady's voice. One of the very few good things about working for the army.

[linko9]

He posted the making of:

http://www.locomalito.com/images/covers ... ing_of.pdf

interesting

Cool, love the backwards Spanish lyrics!

[Enhasa]

If you liked this game, I really suggest donating to this guy and mentioning Hydorah in the comment (so he knows which game you're donating for). I thought he deserved my money, unlike a certain bundle of games I regretted donating to. I read the "making of" too, and the "philosophy" stuff on his site, pretty interesting.

Someone want to create a score thread? I know scoring is quite broken (in addition to stuff mentioned, point values are really wacky like an extra extend at max is only 1000, secrets only worth 500), but I have a non-broken score (no saving, no unlockables, I didn't milk or suicide, etc) that I'd submit if there was a thread. I'd do it myself but I don't want to have to keep maintaining it after I stop caring.

Any suggestion on No Mercy (boss rush stage) ? I can't beat this stage without dying a lot (4 or 5) times. 2nd boss, 3rd boss and last boss are really frustrating.

Bringing in scort helps a lot (as it does the whole game obviously), rest doesn't really matter.

1st boss: Stay right in front of it, move when it beams. Alternately, stay just offset of it the whole time, slower this way of course.
2nd: Don't stand right in the middle at the beginning or you'll die to the boss entrance, lol. Happened to me, I was kinda pissed. Watch out for death explosions the whole time, keep away. For safety, only shoot the purple orb when it's moving away. Move to the opposite side (top vs bottom) when it's about to cross your y-axis. When it's on the left part of the screen, you're on the right side, not shooting it. Do the same thing with the purple blob.
3rd: If you don't have scort, this is a good time to use bombs because it's tougher than it looks. The one attack to worry about is the blue lasers, rest is no problem. To handle this, don't be hugging the back. Then when you cross the lasers, do it by moving outside and back, then inside and back. That way your scort will help protect you.
4th: The times you can get in hits without worrying about being rammed are either when it crosses your x-axis while you're near the center, and when it's slow either at the start or end of its pattern. If you don't know for sure when that's coming, you can ignore that but it will take a lot longer. Make little loops in the center, scort helps a ton here. If you do the loops right, scort will block the rocks he shoots at you.
5th: Stay in the middle of the screen horizontally, not too close unless you are confident you can dodge the ramming attack. Stay right in front of it if confident, a little offset if not. Dodge the missile attack by moving back while you're cutting across and scort will protect you. It's not hard even without scort though.
6th: This looks really easy but it's trickier than it looks. If you can spare one bomb, it helps a ton here. Deploy it to kill the crystals when they get threateningly close to your position on the left of the screen. Otherwise, just stay either directly to the left/right/up/down (or far away) of all the crystals, as much of the time as you can (unless you really have the timing down of when they shoot). It gets exponentially easier as crystals are killed, which is why one bomb makes sense.
Final: He's intimidating at first but you really don't need anything to beat him: no scort, no bombs, nothing. Scort actually hurts you here IMO. He alternates between two phases: spinning blades while invulnerable, then middle beam + additional lasers later. When the blades get hit, they freeze in place for a while before floating away. You want to trigger this as rarely as possible, to make dodging easier as you sweep up to avoid a set, then sweep down to avoid the next. So stop shooting and try not to hit them with scort either. 2nd phase is easier, just hit the weak part while avoiding the easy beam. The trick is getting ready for the first set of lasers. They start coming out of the joints after 3 beams, and they're easy as long as you're ready for them. Keep at it and he'll go down soon.

So the next time you play the stage just pick a different weapon. I tried that stage with the spread shot few times and it was much, much harder than with the laser, might not even be possible to destroy the big laser gun. As a general rule, after you've unlocked a better primary weapon there's really no reason to go back to the earlier ones. Also, Scort as the secondary weapon is pretty damn useful as the options cancel out bullets, lasers and destroyable scenery.

The stage stops scrolling so you always have time to destroy the big laser gun. I was curious what would happen so I tried it out.

Everything is crazily unbalanced like you said, later ones are way better and make things way easier. It actually helps the game somehow because you can intentionally use crappy weapons for a challenge.

anyone else has the garbled sound problem??? I am trying to play this on my nVidia ION HTPC with win7 , runs smoothly but music+sfx are distorted... ffdshow installation (use it or no use it) and the saudio.* stuff inside the game dir did not solve the problem... anything else to try? the game is awesome on my 37" LCD monitor...

It's probably a codec issue since ffdshow gets brought up as a solution. I have no idea why this game would need codecs just to play mp3s, but I dunno shit about Game Maker so maybe it's like that for some reason.

[Square King]

Wow.

I'm sending this guy some money.

[Herr Schatten]

Colour me impressed. The game's up there with the likes of Gradius Gaiden. Next year, this will make my top 25 for sure.

[Obiwanshinobi]

The game's up there with the likes of Gradius Gaiden.

It's the synthesizer...

[Shocky]

What a kick-ass game!

anyone else has the garbled sound problem??? I am trying to play this on my nVidia ION HTPC with win7 , runs smoothly but music+sfx are distorted... ffdshow installation (use it or no use it) and the saudio.* stuff inside the game dir did not solve the problem... anything else to try? the game is awesome on my 37" LCD monitor...

I have the distorted sound problem on my Asus Eee PC 1005P netbook Windows 7. The saudio.* fix didn't do anything for me. I haven't done an ffdshow exception, because I haven't installed any ffdshow stuff in the first place (I just bought the netbook). I guess we're stuck with this problem and have to play on another computer :/ I hope that locomalito guy comes up with a solution soon, the game really is the best thing I've seen in ages.

[MathU]

The game's up there with the likes of Gradius Gaiden.

Whoa, let's not go overboard now.

[bob]

I stopped playing it since it's unplayable with my stick (the whole games just slowes down when I press a button or move the stick).
I think others reported similar problems when a gamepad is used.

And since I don't like to play with keyboard I probably won't play it again (until a patch is released) which is a shame because the game really is fun to play.

[Gungriffon Geona]

The game's up there with the likes of Gradius Gaiden.

Whoa, let's not go overboard now.

the only thing that really holds it back from that is Gaiden had some really crazy shit going on for a gradius game. the bio stage's boss was fun, plant stage was fucking spectacular, ditto on the black hole stage, and the bosses were extremely inventive considering they were mostly the gradius core bosses. Presentation was totally rock solid in every right, as was the gameplay. You simply won't get games of that caliber anymore.

Hydorah is up there, and it's definitely on the heels of Gaiden, but it just falls short of that class of wow factor and polish.

[mjclark]

Wow-I so want to play this but I'm getting the audio and video freezing on XP. I've been chatting to the developer and have tried: ffdshow exceptions, disabling visual themes and changing screen resolution but it's still unplayable here.
Any more bright ideas, cos my lowly Geforce 6200 plays just about most things,eh?

Ah ha-PROBLEM SOLVED!!!! Installed soundcard instead of using onboard sound and now everything's just fine

[Mr_Staypuft]

Very sad to hear that some Shmuppers are having trouble getting this to run.

I'll happily admit I'm not anywhere near as 'hardcore' as most people here, (most Bullet Hell games scare me)
but I'd easily put Hydorah in my top 10 freeware/indie games of all time.

Yep, there's some nasty difficulty spikes... but it does so much RIGHT, for me.

Finally - if anyone's interested in hearing from the programmer about the specific ideas he got from various classic shmups,
seeing full-page concept sketches (more than what you see in his PDF), reading about his next project, etc...
...I recently published a BIG interview with Locomalito.

Feedback welcome, of course.

[linko9]

Awesome interview, can't wait for his next game.

[MathU]

I know he tried to make a "middle" ground between home games and arcade games, but I'm beginning to wonder if such a thing really exists. I just don't like that save system. I think the game would be considerably more enjoyable to replay if he just removed the save system. I wonder how much effort it would take to make a streamlined "arcade" mode.

[Mr_Staypuft]

Awesome interview, can't wait for his next game.

Thanks Linko

It's always a challenge to ask the 'right' questions in order to hopefully get intersting answers.

Did anyone have something they *hoped* to learn about Loco/Hydorah that I didn't cover?
It's real tricky on the web, to cover the bases without going too long... no-one wants to scroll too far down a page.

[Obiwanshinobi]

I know he tried to make a "middle" ground between home games and arcade games, but I'm beginning to wonder if such a thing really exists. I just don't like that save system. I think the game would be considerably more enjoyable to replay if he just removed the save system. I wonder how much effort it would take to make a streamlined "arcade" mode.

I suppose he just wanted to make a computer game you can't break with credit feeding. A game you can only play properly, whether you care about the arcade ethos or not. You don't even need to be aware of some people out there making a fuss about their 1CCs and scores to make the most of Hydorah.

[bcass]

It's a shame this was made with GameMaker as it means stuff like not being able to use a 360 dpad and the blurry graphics will never get fixed.

[linko9]

Shouldn't playing on a CRT solve the blurry graphics? As long as your monitor can run at a native resolution equal to the resolution of the game, there should be no problem, unless I'm missing something.

[bcass]

I am playing on a CRT, and still get blurry graphics. I emailed the games author, and he told me to look for options in my graphics card that turns off smoothing. I turned it off, but the graphics are still blurry.

[Obiwanshinobi]

I am playing on a CRT, and still get blurry graphics. I emailed the games author, and he told me to look for options in my graphics card that turns off smoothing. I turned it off, but the graphics are still blurry.

EVERY TIME YOU FIRE UP THE APPLICATION, SWITCH THE RESOLUTION TO THE GAME'S NATIVE (the menus should be self-explanatory enough). You've got blurry graphics because they are (badly) upscaled.
- Fire up the game.
- Go to "SCREEN MODE".
- Press F2.
- Wait a second or so.
- If only your CRT supports 240x320, this should solve the problem.

[bcass]

That's the very first thing I did when I loaded the game for the first time. It didn't work.

[Mr_Staypuft]

I emailed the programmer about the blurring issue, suggesting he use the 'ChevyRay' script utilised by Spelunky for crisp upscaling.

Alas, he'd already tried this, but the problem with ChevyRay's use of Gamemaker 'surfaces' is that when you have rotating sprites
(and Hydorah has quite a few of those) they rotate at their original (small) resolution, whilst the rest of the screen is stretched (big) to fullscreen.

Bummer.

[bcass]

It needs porting to XNA (C#) or Allegro (C++). That'll be no small task though.

[nippondreams]

I tried to use my Saturn USB Controller, but it I'm unable to get this to work.
System Configuration shows me, that everything is correctly installed, Mame and other Emulators working well with it.
I tried the Ingame Button Configuration Menu, but its not taking my inputs from the Saturn Controller.
Is somebody able to get this to work?

Thank you Chris

[dannnnn]

Have you tried using Xpadder?

[Herr Schatten]

I tried to use my Saturn USB Controller, but it I'm unable to get this to work.
System Configuration shows me, that everything is correctly installed, Mame and other Emulators working well with it.
I tried the Ingame Button Configuration Menu, but its not taking my inputs from the Saturn Controller.
Is somebody able to get this to work?

It worked right out of the box for me. The game played fine with my USB Saturn pad.

[nimitz]

Finally tried it.

A good euroshmup...

5.5/10

[Dave_K.]

A good euroshmup...

You're calling gradius a euroshump?

[nimitz]

This game has nothing to do with Gradius.

Other than the visual style that is.

[bcass]

Finally tried it.

A good euroshmup...

5.5/10

That's more than I'd give most Gradius games to be honest.