Procyon (Now Available on Steam!)

[Deadly Red Cube]

Hey there! I built a shmup entitled Procyon (website: http://procyongame.com. It is available on Steam for Windows (As well as Desura and IndieCity)!

You can grab it here:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/266250







(Trailer video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1NXh48kCBg)


Procyon is a bit more old-school in its sensibilities than the modern bullet hell variety (as most of my favorite shmup games are in the Gradius series). However, I would still like it to be solid in its own right, so I thought I'd solicit for opinions and advice.

The probably-controversial design decision for the game is the shield. It's not like a normal health bar where you can just soak hits without thinking about it - it requires you to be holding a key for it to be active (however, it has a limited duration and recharges over time). As such, there will be unavoidable bullet patterns (never in easy mode, only near the last chunk of normal, and frequently in hard) that will require you to manage your shield to stay alive.

Anyway, I'd love to hear any thoughts that people have on it. Honest feedback is appreciated and helpful...the most useful feedback is almost always the things that people DON'T like.

While the default is that ship steering is controlled via the mouse (unless you're playing with an Xbox 360 gamepad), you can, from the options menu, change it over to be keyboard-only. All keys are assignable - I picked some defaults that don't bind up on my keyboard, but they may not be as ideal for you. If you do choose a different control scheme that works, I'd love if you'd let me know so that I can see what kinds of key layouts others are using.

If you are unlucky and happen to have the game crash, please do have the game send a crash report (it'll prompt you after the game shuts down), so that I can try to locate and fix the issues. It's not like Windows Error reporting - this goes straight to me. Also, because the crash reporting doesn't collect any sort of hardware information (it's purely in-game information), if you wouldn't mind also posting your system specs here, too.

Also, if you are having performance issues, please let me know what your system specs are. I'm still trying to sort out what needs to be done to get it running on as many systems as possible.


Again, I'd love some feedback on what I'm doing right/wrong so far. I have already followed some advice I've found while browsing this board (i.e. "make sure bullets are visible over explosions"). I'd love some specific advice.

Thanks!

Josh

[Rozyrg]

I think the shield system you're using definitely sidesteps the old issue with lifebars, as it's apparent you have to use it strategically to survive. It's really not that much different than having to memorize where you need to be not to collide into an obstacle.... as opposed to simply having to take hits from clumsily scattered enemy shots.

Also...this game is gorgeous!
Somehow, I have a feeling neither of my PCs would run this well at all...lol.

[Deadly Red Cube]

I think the shield system you're using definitely sidesteps the old issue with lifebars, as it's apparent you have to use it strategically to survive. It's really not that much different than having to memorize where you need to be not to collide into an obstacle.... as opposed to simply having to take hits from clumsily scattered enemy shots.

Also...this game is gorgeous!
Somehow, I have a feeling neither of my PCs would run this well at all...lol.

Thanks! I'm glad that the shield comes across as conceptually distinct from lifebars...I've worried that it wouldn't necessarily come off that way.

I've updated the demo - now it has two stages instead of just one, and you can now play the game in portrait mode, either by resizing the game window to be portrait instead of landscape, or by playing it fullscreen on a portrait monitor. I've also made a few game balance tweaks (mostly lowering some enemy hit points), but there's still more to do

What kind of computer systems do you have? I'm curious whether either of them is near what I'm hoping to make the minimum requirements.

Thanks again!

[lilmanjs]

Not a fan of the music for the game, but other than that this game looks amazing. I know my PC won't be likely to play it, as I can't even play Jamestown on lowest settings. but still this looks quite good and the shield seems to work quite well in the gameplay video.

[Deadly Red Cube]

Not a fan of the music for the game, but other than that this game looks amazing. I know my PC won't be likely to play it, as I can't even play Jamestown on lowest settings. but still this looks quite good and the shield seems to work quite well in the gameplay video.

Thanks What is it, if I may ask, that you don't like about the music? The music in the video is the oldest track in the game and I'm hoping to redo it - but I'll be keeping the overall orchestral style of the game.

I've updated the demo again with a number of stability fixes - For instance, on non-DX10 cards, changing the graphics settings will no longer crash the game.
Also I've fixed some issues with the control in the menu, as well as making the mouse pointer more responsive.

Finally, I've now officially tested the game on my old AMD64 with a Radeon 9800. It can't keep a perfect 60Hz framerate, but it's surprisingly playable. Yay!

Thanks again for the continued feedback

[Deadly Red Cube]

Hey!

I've update the demo again (link at the top of the thread), if anyone's interested - mostly a score of balance changes. Also, 2P mode should be more or less playable now - I've made a lot of changes in easy differentiation of the players, visually.

Any feedback would be appreciated!

Thanks

[lilmanjs]

After watching the video of Stage 1 again, I've come to remember why I don't like the music. The music isn't bad by any means, but to me it just feels like something that belongs in an RPG and not a shmup. still I'm gonna try out the demo and see how well it runs.

[Deadly Red Cube]

Hey all, I've updated the demo again!

I've revamped both the level designs and the enemies a little bit - the general gist is "more enemies, less hit points, faster-to-attack". I've also added a bit of scrolling when moving up and down on-screen, so the playing field is now larger than the screen.

Demo is still located at<Demo Temporarily Removed, Sorry About That>

Videos:
Stage 1, hard mode: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKLJPqjRDsw
Stage 2, hard mode: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tCVLVaX-ws

Additionally, I've added a slow movement command so that pure keyboard movement is now actually a plausible control choice (you can switch from mouse steering to keyboard-only in the options menu).

The big problem I'm aware of is that smaller enemy ships tend to blend into the stage 2 background - The background is only temporary, but I'm working on ironing that out because it sucks.

Let me know if you have any feedback! I'd love to have some input from people who actually care about shmups before I dive any further into later levels!

EDIT: I should note that "Arcade Mode" is effectively broken in this build - the rate at distributing lives is way off since the level restructure. I'm still rethinking it.

[Deadly Red Cube]

Hello! It's been a while, but I've been busy trying to finish Procyon up.

It's basically done now (minus some work that I'm doing to make it easier to port to other OSes like Mac and Linux), and it's on Steam Greenlight and I was hoping that you all might take a look at it and, ideally, vote it up


Procyon on Greenlight: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/f ... =116947568


Additionally, here's a link to the game trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1NXh48kCBg
And, finally, because why not, here's the game's intro in which you can see how totally seriously I'm taking the storyline: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyuKtX1OM0A </sarcasm>

Procyon's really a vertical shmup that I just happen to have coded on its side to take full advantage of a standard 16:9 monitor/TV (however, if you have a portrait monitor setup it will totally play that way, in a more-traditional vertical shmup layout). It has two-player local co-op and I'm hoping to get onto Steam to be able to give it steam achievements and leaderboards (Because shared high scores are awesome).

Because it was so out of date and I didn't make a new version before I started hacking the renderer apart to make it more portable, I've pulled down the demo that I had linked here for now. I'm hoping to put it back once I can sort out which parts of the renderer are horribly horribly broken (hint: most of it).

Anyway, I'd love it if you'd take a peek at the Greenlight page and give it some love. And tell your friends. And perhaps your pets, if they happen to have Steam accounts, too.

If you have any questions, let me know, I'll do my best to answer

Thanks!

[Xonatron]

Just voted for you!

[Deadly Red Cube]

Awesome, thanks for the help!

It's not doing so well on Greenlight, truth be told...though I didn't really expect it to. Shmups aren't the most popular genre and I'm really bad at marketing.

I'm in the middle of porting it off of XNA to make porting to other platforms easier (It's now a thin, custom platform-specific layer with everything else situated on top), and then I'll probably be looking at releasing on other setups (Desura? Turbulenz? Chrome Web Store? Not sure yet), since Greenlight seems particularly out of reach, and I can't release on XBLIG due to being a Sony employee (good ol' conflict of interest!)

Hopefully I'll have the game released in some form or another pretty soon, regardless

Thanks again

[Deadly Red Cube]

Hello! It's been a while, but I finally released Procyon on Desura and IndieCity:






I hope you enjoy it, and thanks for the early feedback!

[Xonatron]

Bought! I'll support you on Greenlight too. Your game certainly has a 1942: Joint Strike (XBLA) feel to it. I'm interested to see how it plays through to the end.

[Drachenherz]

Ah, this looks very interesting. Tell me more about the "playable in portait-mode" thingy.

Also: I like your humour!

Will definitely greenlight this and probably will buy it too. The trailer is absolutely gorgeous, loving the visual style, gameplay looks very good (woah, shield!) and the music in the trailer isn't bad at all - au contraire, it made the trailer awesome!

So, it means that you implemented switched controls when in portrait mode, so it really plays like a vertical shmup? Seriously, I love you, bro!

[Deadly Red Cube]

Thanks!

Yeah, portrait mode basically means that it rotates the playing field so that it plays like a vertical shmup. It's fantastic on a portrait monitor because, of course, you get the whole screen filled, but you can kick it into portrait on a landscape monitor, too, it's just going to be very, very pillarboxed.

Even though I built the game in landscape mode, I much prefer playing in portrait. I think it's due to the top-down perspective (vs. the side-on that you usually get with an horiz shmup), but it just feels right.

[Drachenherz]

Okay, bought it.

Woah, it really feels intense! Greenlighting it now! Really, it's great to see quite a few indie-shmups pop up lately, I hope this trend continues and more and more quality stuff is released.

[Grindie]

Voted yes based on how gorgeous it looks! Gonna go snag it now.

[Remembrance]

Looks like the Greenlight paid off, since this is on Steam today.

Sounds pretty good, judging by past reactions?

[Deadly Red Cube]

Wow that was funny timing, I was just updating the thread with the new Steam links and whatnot!

As Remembrance noted, the game hit Steam today! Thanks to everyone here for the support during development, your feedback was appreciated

[mice]

Stills look a bit euroshmuppy but when it moves...my god I want to play this.

[broken harbour]

I bought Procyon on Steam last night, and played through it on easy. The game is actually quite good, nice sense of humour during the pre-stage cutscenes, gameplay is fun, kind of like a cross between a Darius and R-Type game, but without powerups, and less memorization heavy than R-Type. The Shield/Powerup mechanic is well thought out with a nice risk/reward thing going on. Graphics are nice too, great music. Sound effects are a tad weedy, but acceptable. My only real complaint is that Stage 4 is waaaaaayyyy too long compared to the other stages, and the ship movement is a bit jumpy. It's not a bullet hell type game, so it's not like the control has to be pixel perfect, but I did die a few times because the ship moves around so fast. There is a slow movement toggle button but I never used it.

Overall, for the $3 you spend, well worth your time and money.

[Deadly Red Cube]

My only real complaint is that Stage 4 is waaaaaayyyy too long compared to the other stages, and the ship movement is a bit jumpy. It's not a bullet hell type game, so it's not like the control has to be pixel perfect, but I did die a few times because the ship moves around so fast. There is a slow movement toggle button but I never used it.

Yeah, stages 3 and 4 are a bit long, It's one of the things that I'm less than happy about with the game.

The movement was really based on having some sort of analog control (ideally, an XInput controller's analog stick, but mouse works), so it does move a bit quick for keyboard/dpad/digital joystick players - hence the slow movement button. I didn't want to sacrifice the speed with which you can quickly get around the screen for them, so I opted to add a "slow" button to allow you to move at least a little more precisely. It's what it's there for.

Overall, glad you liked it! Thanks for the feedback!