Tululoo Shoot

[eruiz00]

Hey, this is a little new shmup which I made in about four days...

It's made with a wonderful tool called Tululoo Game Maker, and runs in latest browsers.

Has 6 stages, with it's respective bosses, and it's like hype (msx) in a horizontal sense. The concept is that you can't display everytime, because your ship become slow and it's not posible to avoid enemy fire.

It's difficult, very difficult, but I think that it's not bad at all. Key I while playing to see the end...

https://rapidshare.com/files/2162619243 ... ootV12.rar

Please try and tell me what you think!

[ptoing]

This is pretty bad, sorry.

I only bothered playing to the first boss. I could not take more of it.
Here is why:

-Your main gimmick is not very nice, it makes the controls feel very clunky and thus it is not very fun to move around and avoiding stuff becomes more of a chore than anything.

-The bullets are not very visible.

-The 1st boss had pretty ass bulletpatterns which were quite hard to avoid while also hitting the boss. And on top of that quite fast lasers without warning.

Lesson learned:
A good game is not made in 4 days.

[RNGmaster]

Lesson to devs: High difficulty is not the same as fun if it's unfair.

[Deadly Red Cube]

Based on the ~30 seconds that I played this, here's my feedback:

• Ships that come from behind you (without warning) are EVIL. Not the good kind of evil. The kind where you just die and there's nothing that you can do about it if you didn't know it was going to happen. Seriously, don't do that. Ever.
• Ships that fly in from behind you (already evil) and then shoot fast, nearly-invisible bullets at you are even worse. REALLY don't do this
• On the subject of the enemies that fly in and shoot, these guys are uncool because you aren't even given enough time to react to get over to shoot them (given your slow movement speed and slow bullet speed) before they've entered, shot, and left again. You'll only get them if you were already shooting at the right place when they show up.
• As stated, your bullets are near-impossible to see against the background.
• Performance was spotty
• WTF THE BOSS SHOT THIS FAST LASER AT ME AND KILLED ME WITH NO WARNING GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

Remember, you're making a SHOOT-em-up. The goal of the game is to blow up lots of enemy ships. Tululoo Shoot seems to be designed to make actually hitting enemies as HARD AS POSSIBLE. You have enemies that fly in patterns that are taller and faster than your movement speed, you have enemies that enter and leave before you can even react, and you have enemies that show up from behind you that you can't get anyway. I was able to hit maybe 1 in 5 or even 1 in 10 enemies that showed up, which is less about my skills as a player and more about the design of the game.

None of those elements are terribly fun.

The one thing I kinda liked was the option positioning system.
What can you do to fix it?

• First, reevaluate the enemy behavior patterns. Try to make sure that you hit the "fair" half of "hard, but fair", since right now the game is "hard, but mean".
• Make the bullets more visible - I'd personally make them orange, which will really pop out against the blue and black background (as orange and blue are complementary colors)
• If you have to have enemies come from behind, add some sort of warning flashes
• ESPECIALLY on bosses, you have to make sure to let the player know "something bad is about to happen in this area of the screen". This could include the slow march of bullets away from the gun, or maybe a tracer for a beam attack. But for the LOVE OF ALL THAT IS GOOD AND FUN, no attacks that aren't telegraphed or otherwise humanly dodgeable

Essentially, you need to make the game more fair. It does not have to be EASIER, as long as you make it possible for the player to get out of whatever situation that you put him in, within the confines of the human reaction time. Remember that YOU made the game and know where everything is, so it's going to be, by default, much much MUCH easier for you to get into the proper positions for things. Other people are going to have to react to what's on-screen.

Okay, I think I've hammered the point home here. The game needs work, for sure, but it doesn't have to be a total gut job. Take the core of what you've built and make new enemy movement/attack patterns that aren't sadface.

[eruiz00]

Ummm... thank you for your comments...

I only wanted to test Tululoo Game Maker. It has been a very good experience, however.

I know it's a difficult one, but I have to say that I have come to the end one time, without using I key. Most of the times I get to the fifth stage.

I'm a experienced (very experienced!) player and I have to say that I only did a game like those I liked in the past. I Think that some of the greatest shmups of all times were very unfair games, like Radiant Silvergun, some cave bullet hell shmups or Gradius arcade versions, by example. However, with many hours of practice, it was posible to get to the end of the games (I did it!).

In radiant silvergun saturn version, had to play enough to get a deccent weapons level, and then, accomplish it to the end.

However, I'll think about this and in my next shmup (i have doing a better one on Tululoo too!) I'll do it better, although don't make any promise

Thank you!

[ptoing]

RSG is hardly unfair. Hard and requiring memorisation perhaps, unfair no.
None of Cave's games are what I would call unfair (apart from perhaps Donpachi which has some cheap places in later levels) Again, yes hard, but not unfair.
I am not vouching for Gradius as I am not a big fan and yeh, the whole thing that you are pretty much fucked if you die once, unless you are a very good player could be considered unfair.

Also you have made your game, you know where shit comes from, so it will be easier for you.

The whole "get slow as fuck while you shoot" mechanic still is unfair, and feels super clunky.

Difficult does not equal unfair. If the game is unfair all but the most masochistic of players will just stop playing it after a while. Most people do not like getting shafted because of bad game mechanics or shit controls.

This thread points out a lot of mistakes many beginners who make shmups fall prey to. Read it. Now. Don't give up!

[Udderdude]

[BPzeBanshee]

For being a ripoff of GameMaker:HTML5 this Tululoo thing has no error-checking. Good for making a shmup........if you kept track of everything and knew how to make a good game.

This one fails at being a good game but certainly beats the example crap that's around for "TROLOLO Game Maker". The rest of my criticisms have already been mentioned.

Since you seem to have a fair idea of how to get things working with Tululoo Game Maker, do keep up but take our advice and read the developer's mistakes thread.

[Suslik]

Finished first stage and a bit from second stage, then quit.

Barely visible bullets is an issue.

In my opinion instant kill lazers and enemies coming from behind is not an issue - the game has to be played several times.

Make the game run 5x faster (or just a lot faster, whatever makes sense to you)and ill play it again. At the moment it is too boring. Maybe in later stages the game becomes intense and 5x speed becomes unfair, i'm suggesting this based on 1.5 stages that i played trough.