shMUSICup Open Beta

[cj iwakura]

http://tzai-entertainment.com/games/shmusicup/

Really fricking easy, but worth a try. I feel like the bullets should be much faster.

Maybe I'm spoiled on Touhou and stuff.

[Treasurance]

makes Space Invaders Infinity Gene's music mode look exciting

[Bananamatic]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6349Q-67eA

still ez

[ptoing]

The best thing about this is how the hitbox is on the girls ass. I approve of that.

[emphatic]

The best thing about this is how the hitbox is on the girls ass. I'd hit that.

^^^fixed.

[Demetori]

I got bored after a minute of my favorite song playing... And I don't really want to buy something I can't test on harder mode it seems.

EDIT: Did unlock the other stages, buut... after playing the same boss a few times with different songs, not much changed in the pattern for me. Just a few extra bullets, and all the break downs or heavy bass sections of songs didn't do much.

[Avatar Ignis]

Man i wanted this game to be good so bad, but the demo was pretty bland. Tried a song with alot of variation (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=in0h71WceI4 Informal Gluttony by Between the Buried and Me), and didn't really pick up how i wanted it to at certain parts. Unless the harder modes of the game is more in synch with the music, not sure if im going to buy this. Shame really, would of been nice to combine my love of metal music and shmups

[Bananamatic]

Did anyone try Dragonforce yet?

[Udderdude]

Seems pretty bugged, I can't get it to even show anything once the game starts. Just an empty lifebar and endlessly scrolling background of nothing.

[TodayIsForgotten]

Did anyone try Dragonforce yet?

Eh on Chill mode the patterns were super boring playing. I played a band called Orpheus and even on the blast beats it was like *yawn*. Can't vogue for the other two modes since i am not buying this game.

Orpheus - Neath
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MtEnW2h38o

[Bananamatic]

Play some Dream Theater and counterstop it

[DragonInstall]

Very cool idea. It seems to work pretty well with rock based music.

I like how the boss life is proportionate to the length of the song. Second boss with some upbeat music was pretty decent on normal. If only we had access to the harder difficulty, than we could not get so bored.

[Wonderbanana]

It's done well but tbh I didn't feel like I was shooting anything, just dodging shit.

[njiska]

Played a couple of songs on this and I have to say it feels both boring and restrictive. But I think a few simple changes could make it interesting. For example just some random ideas.

- Bullet Scraping
It doesn't seem like there's much you can do to vary your score aside from not getting hit and holding down shot. It'd be far more interesting if they introduced bullet scraping. This completely opens up scoring and allows for varied play-styles. Just make the points for scraping relative to the distance of your core to the bullet. Make the boss time out when the song is over and have a proportional amount of health so this isn't abused.

- Varied Barrages
It really doesn't feel like the barrages change. When they do change it's like the end of the song. They need to happen more often then just after the song stops.

- Make boss parts destructible
A game where it's you against one enemy begs for bosses that can be picked apart. It would give you something to do other than keep dodging the same pattern over and over again. It also solves the above issue of repetitive barrages.

Just some thoughts.

[DragonInstall]

Apparently there is grazing by picking a certain char. But you have to pay to access this

[Udderdude]

You'd think you wouldn't have to pay for basic things like skill levels and scoring systems, but that's what you get when your shmup is so bereft of any real content.

In my case, no content at all. Still can't even get it to fucking do anything. :P

[Evilmaxwar]

Looks like you dont even need to shoot, boss hp goes down with the music time left, ill try with a 5 sec song as a test.

EDIT : LOL , used a 4 second mp3 and the boss blew itself up before it fully entered the screen and the Get ready was still flashing, Hilarious.

EDIT : I even got the perfect achievement, but didnt beat my hi-score

[drei :3]

Man i wanted this game to be good so bad, but the demo was pretty bland.

Ditto, it's still beta though.

It's trivial to max out the multiplier in the prox-mode demo, given that you don't collide with the boss. Found it really peaceful up there, though I did get hit when the achievement display obscured part of the playing field. Flying really close for a while should trigger some fierce additional attacks, and I don't mean attacks by achievement pop-ups.

It feels wrong that the boss always explodes at the end. Based on how much you shoot it, it should do one of these things: escape, explode, explode with a bigger explosion and with lots of score items raining down. They apparantly have a separate aim-mode, but however that works, this should be in any mode. It's just too unshmuppy otherwise.

[gameoverDude]

This was not bad to play around with for a bit. But it needs more bullet patterns and a greater count of bullets on screen at once (at least double and a half what's usually on the screen).

Some songs do come out decent with a fair number of bullets, while more than a few don't produce too good of a result. Before I throw down the money for it, I'd like to know what the Intense mode is like. Graze mode is likely to be better than the Prox mode- Prox feels like just a dodgem-up.

Nice idea, but not awesome.

[linko9]

The bullet patterns seem to have very, very little relation to the music. They don't even come out on the beat. If it could actually fit the patterns to the music, it might be cool.

[LeeVanCleef]

I picked one of the free songs they had and I was able to sit directly in front of the spider's mouth and dodge all the bullets. I was pretty excited about this game, but after I played it a few times it needs some work before I would consider buying it.

Played a couple of songs on this and I have to say it feels both boring and restrictive. But I think a few simple changes could make it interesting. For example just some random ideas.

- Bullet Scraping
It doesn't seem like there's much you can do to vary your score aside from not getting hit and holding down shot. It'd be far more interesting if they introduced bullet scraping. This completely opens up scoring and allows for varied play-styles. Just make the points for scraping relative to the distance of your core to the bullet. Make the boss time out when the song is over and have a proportional amount of health so this isn't abused.

- Varied Barrages
It really doesn't feel like the barrages change. When they do change it's like the end of the song. They need to happen more often then just after the song stops.

- Make boss parts destructible
A game where it's you against one enemy begs for bosses that can be picked apart. It would give you something to do other than keep dodging the same pattern over and over again. It also solves the above issue of repetitive barrages.

Just some thoughts.

I agree, especially with the destructable parts on the boss.

[balp]

Seems pretty bugged, I can't get it to even show anything once the game starts. Just an empty lifebar and endlessly scrolling background of nothing.

I'm also gettin this

[drei :3]

I told them about this thread via the in-game bug/idea message option. Hope they are reading this.

Here are ALL my ideas regarding this game:

MENU

Put more emphasis on the game being beta and that there are more modes and more challenging stuff (also put something on Youtube with wilder attacks than the other videos, please), so that more players who feel underwhelmed reconsider coming back. There are locked flying modes — a big selling point — but the game doesn't tell anything about them, other than they are locked. True, it's somewhere on the website, but the info should also be right there in the game.

When selecting the music, there's a next button, and if you haven't selected music, it tells you to do it. There's no reason for this button to exist before the player selects any music, and pressing okay during music selection might as well directly trigger the next step in the menu. There could be a big button for random selection of one of the free songs instead.


GRAPHICS IN GENERAL

They are very colourful and thankfully the shots are very clear, so there are only a few visibility issues, like with achievements obscuring the playfield, these should rather be displayed on the side. When enemy shots are about to come into existence, they shouldn't come out of nothing, but be signalled in some way, with different signals for different shots. Increase readability of bars by segmenting them. The player's sprite could be a bit more lively, like looking different when not shooting (also with a different tilt animation when moving sideways), and striking a unique pose for bombing.

I like when concepts are visualized in a more concrete manner than some numbers going up. The game should signal visually what is important in each mode, so that a player directly feels it without reading the descriptions or even looking at the HUD. So here are some ideas for that.


MODES

Imagine this: An energy ball orbits the player in PROX mode, and when the player gets close to the boss, this energy orb hits it and the boss flashes; and if you do several such hits in quick succession, the orb starts to look more powerful for a while and if you hit the boss with the more powerful version, it bleeds shiny score items.

There should definitely be some additional shot type for the boss that is triggered by flying close for a while, in any mode. It should really flip out and try to shoot your butt! I didn't play the other modes, so some of the following suggestions may be redundant.

The concept of GRAZE mode could be visualized with the player automatically shooting homing shots at regular intervals, and the shots getting more impressive-looking when the graze multiplier goes up. You could spice things up a bit with a 2-sided grazing mechanic: If you graze with a wing, that wing start to glow more and more (and wings get colder again when the homing shots happen), and using both sides for grazing makes the multiplier rise faster.

I agree with others here that destructable parts would be nice. The basic concept can even be implemented without much additional work on the graphics, you could just have shell segments that heat up when hit, when hit enough times such a segment explodes (happens with fewer hits if these hits are done without interruption) and a differently shaded version of the boss gets revealed piece by piece. Transforming bosses would look cooler though. In AIM mode, each destroyed shell piece should drop a shiny score item.

AND...

And in general, all scoring items should pulsate and give more points if collected when they are the shiniest, you know, another element of rhythm. And definitely put in different endings, boss fleeing/normal explosion/super-explosion based on how much it is shot. Aaaaand make the player move faster when not shooting.

I expect all this to be implemented until tomorrow :3
/jk

[jasontan]

Thanks for informing us about the discussion here drei :3, really appreciate it! I am Jason Tan, one of the developers of Shmusicup. We want to make the game as fun as possible, and are working hard towards it, hence the open beta to collect valuable feedback. There are many great points mentioned here that will help improve the game, and we will be looking into these issues as we continue development. (Probably not in time to finish everything by tomorrow though )

I understand that the earlier levels might be too easy for shmup veterans, especially Touhou players. We wanted to introduce the shmup genre which we love to more people, and we think that lowering the barrier of entry would get more gamers interested in this niche genre. I'm sure everyone hopes to share such a great genre with their friends! Higher levels are harder though, as shown from this video created by CapsuleComputers (who are in the process of writing a review of Shmusicup, I will post the review here when it's done): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6HPyd_kPCg

This is not the hardest level yet, and the music chosen is also slow. We are polishing up a trailer to showcase more of the game, which will include footage of the hardest boss, Flare. This trailer will be up very soon in the coming week.

There is also an unlockable option to increase and decrease the speed of the bullets, as demonstrated in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPmGZOv8Qqo

As for the modes, @njiska: your scraping suggestion is great, and there is actually a graze mode. @drei :3: having the game show what the modes are for even when they are locked makes a whole lot of sense, we have overlooked that.

@Udderdude & balp: Very sorry that you guys have met with errors with the game, there are a few reports of the game not working in Chrome and in the Mac version of Firefox. We are working on this bug, if you could can you guys please let me know your operating system, your browser and if possible your Flash plugin version (you can find out from here: http://www.adobe.com/software/flash/about/)? Thank you in advance for your time, and in the mean time you could try accessing the game with a different browser and see if that works. Sorry for the inconvenience caused.

Once again thank you guys for your invaluable feedback, your suggestions are awesome and we had originally planned for some but due to time constraints they didn't get into the beta. Rest assured we will be looking into every aspect and will be improving on them. Your suggestions mean a lot to us and the game, really appreciate it! Thanks!

Jason

[Avatar Ignis]

I sent them an email regarding whether or not this game will support peripheral controls (like the xbox 260 controller) and they responded almost immediately in a kind manner. They told me it didnt, but gave me a link+directions on how to use joy2pad.

I asked if they could show the hardest mode in action, and it seemed like there were no videos of that available.

Good chance i'll get this, since it'll give me more of an incentive to catch up on my music collection (really looking forward to trying this game paired with early opeth and maybe some oingo boingo ).

I agree with the posters above, the description of what is to be part of the full game needs to be further described as the bullet scraping definitely interests me. so if one character is the standard, another is the bullet scraper, whats the 3rd?

[Sasupoika]

Well, the main issue for me was that the bullet patterns barelly correlated with the music. I remember that one shmup which actually correlated with the music somewhat, but I don't have link to it. And yeah, the first levels are easy. I was able to perfect 5 minutes long song by mainly staying on the top of the screen.

I understand that the earlier levels might be too easy for shmup veterans, especially Touhou players.

Haha!
Hahahaha!

[Ebbo]

Well, the main issue for me was that the bullet patterns barelly correlated with the music. I remember that one shmup which actually correlated with the music somewhat, but I don't have link to it.

Zillion Beatz?

[Sasupoika]

No, it was game that generated the patterns according to the music. It was small program, but it did it kinda well. No graphics, boss was bunch of lights spinning around shooting bullets according to the music and main scoring strat was crazing the fuck out of it.

[nZero]

Bullet Philharmonic Orchestra?

[Udderdude]

@Udderdude & balp: Very sorry that you guys have met with errors with the game, there are a few reports of the game not working in Chrome and in the Mac version of Firefox. We are working on this bug, if you could can you guys please let me know your operating system, your browser and if possible your Flash plugin version (you can find out from here: http://www.adobe.com/software/flash/about/)? Thank you in advance for your time, and in the mean time you could try accessing the game with a different browser and see if that works. Sorry for the inconvenience caused.

I'm using 64-bit Vista and 32-bit Firefox 3.6.15. Latest version of Flash.

Not sure how this will help since Flash bugs such as enemies not appearing usually are because of issues other than the plugin itself.