Aero Flux - Bullet Hell Shooter

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tiaoferreira
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Re: Aero Flux - Bullet Hell Shooter

Post by tiaoferreira »

What is the newest version? I can't find it for download...
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tiaoferreira
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Re: Aero Flux - Bullet Hell Shooter

Post by tiaoferreira »

See your game in FILOSOFIA SHMUP - www.filosofiashmup.blogspot.com
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pieterator
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Re: Aero Flux - Bullet Hell Shooter

Post by pieterator »

I have just uploaded Aero Flux - Beta V1.5. I really wanted to add stage 4 to show some of the new enemies, but I also really wanted some feedback on the new characters. I'm still in the process of making the game more challenging on the 'Very Hard' and 'Bullet Hell' settings. Unfortunately I have not finalized the TATE mode, sorry guys, but don't worry, I will include this feature in the future :D

Here's a brief description of the two new characters' weapons.
Haruka Hiso - Specialist -> Heavy Enemies
  • Main Weapon - She has a special dagger bullet that sticks to the enemy it hits. After 1 second it will do it's damage to the target. A large percentage of her damage is contained in these daggers, so if they hit smaller enemies most of their damage goes to waste. But against heavier enemies that can soak up more damage, her damage per second is about 30% higher than that of the balanced characters (Asuna and Satsuki).
  • Bomb - This full screen attack destroys halve the enemies on the screen regardless of max health, and bosses receive heavy damage. Great if there's lots of big enemies on screen, not so great if there's a 100 small ones.
Hatsune Miku - Specialist -> Light Enemies
  • Main Weapon - Some of her shots explode with a white flash on impact, dealing damage to all enemies in the area. So firing into a swarm of small enemies can push her damage per second a high as 50% above that of a balanced character. Firing against heavier/bigger enemies negates the advantage of her area of effect bullets, and subsequently she does less damage against them.
  • Bomb - This full screen bomb uses the amount of bullets on screen to determine how long it will last, and thus how much damage it will do. It does very low damage per enemy, but it is usually enough to destroy every light and medium enemy on the screen.
Hopefully they complement someone's playstyle, or at least add some fun to the game :D

I've also added a new shock wave effect to the game (upon player death and Miku's bomb), unfortunately this is very resource intensive, and tends to slow the game down if you don't have a dedicated graphics card. To turn it off, go into the file named 'settings.ini' and set 'advanced_effects=0'.

And finally, character pallet swaps have different ships. Colour 1's ships have white halos, and colour 2's ships don't. Please let me which ones you prefer.

Here is the link to Aero Flux - Beta V1.5:
http://www.mediafire.com/?80zotjp6naon4o6
@tiaoferreira: Thanks for adding Aero Flux to FILOSOFIA SHMUP. It is honor to have been picked :D

Here is the changes made since Beta V1.0

Gameplay Changes
*Esc no longer quits the game. Use Alt+F4 instead.
*Stage 3's boat boss is now actually worth points :)
*You now drop a power level when you die, but never lower than level 2.
*Introduced enemy types (Light, Medium, Heavy and Boss).
*Added two new characters - Haruka Hiso (Heavy enemy specialist) and Hatsune Miku (Light enemy specialist).
*Added new enemies.
*Added new scoring mechanics:
**Destoying all enemies in a certain group (Hinted at by "+" signs appearing when enemy is destroyed) will give a bonus.
**Destroying the bigger enemies at point blank range releases bonus stars.
*Bomb saves now work differently:
**A halo around your bomb bar indicates that the reflex bomb will activate on the next hit.
**Normal Difficulty - Replenished at start of a stage and when you die.
**Hard Difficulty - Replenished at start of a stage.
**Very Hard Difficulty - One bomb save per credit.
**Bullet Hell Difficulty - Bomb saves not available.
*Change how Satsuki's lightning bomb deals damage. She now has a reservoir of damage that limits the amount of damage she can do.

Visual Changes
*Player ships update, and banking animations added.
*Added new font for bonus text.
*Added descriptions for characters at select screen.
*Loads of new sprites added for bosses and enemies.
*Changed how the Bomb save looks and sounds.

Game Engine Changes
*Basic TATE mode added (But not implemented yet).
More of my art available at DeviantART.
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BPzeBanshee
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Re: Aero Flux - Bullet Hell Shooter

Post by BPzeBanshee »

Wow, did you have this much functionality in the config in last release? Very helpful for testing indeed if most of what I'm seeing in there actually has an effect in-game! :D

It certainly felt more challenging on the Bullet Hell setting but I'm still feeling that the scoring system seems a bit contradictory. It feels like I should be point-blanking and doing some amount of grazing for more score but if the bulk of the points come from end-of-stage bomb stock than that's pointless, but then you've got other things that pretty much HAVE to be point-blanked. Then again I wanted to fix all this with that Arrange hack I wanted to do but then I bit off more than I could chew. I get the feeling that point-blanking in combination with the + group chaining you have and removal of bombing from end-of-stage bonus (and punishment factor) could work really well but I suppose that's not what you're really after.

Also what's the deadzone on the tanks? Are they non-existant now? I was right over one and a bullet appeared not 2 pixels away from my hitbox.

Speaking of hitboxes I noticed the hitboxes weren't aligned with the new ship sprites. I guess there's not a lot that can be done about that, with moving sprites and all. It also felt that the sprite banking was delayed a bit too much - I suggest making the banking animations near-instant.

I'll post more when I get time to play this over the next few days.
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Rozyrg
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Re: Aero Flux - Bullet Hell Shooter

Post by Rozyrg »

This really is excellent, man. I could just see all the extra polish right away, I can't compliment your work on this enough. :D Love the new ladies, too!

I did get an error when defeating the third boss, though, forcing me to quit the game. Turns out it's good old Mr. Unknown Variable, of course.

Code: Select all

___________________________________________
ERROR in
action number 1
of  Step Event
for object bonus_star:

Error in code at line 13:
               other.points += star_points*other.score_multiplier*difficulty_multiplier
                                                 ^
at position 48: Unknown variable score_multiplier
Also, one minor complaint I have is that it doesn't seem to remember which character you were last using when you continue.
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pieterator
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Re: Aero Flux - Bullet Hell Shooter

Post by pieterator »

@BPzeBanshee: The stuff in the config is definitely planned, but little of it is implemented yet. I agree that bomb stock should not be a scoring mechanic. I will change this in the next release. That way you can use bombs to get point blank kills on some of the more difficult enemies.

The point blank range has been reduced to about 3 pixels or so, mainly because the new scoring mechanic encourages point blank kills and I didn't want the difficulty to suffer because of this. Let me know if this makes it to difficult and increase it again. For reference, the point blank range for bonus stars is 65 pixels. I'll tweak the banking a bit and see how it feels.


@Rozyrg: Thanks for posting the error. That was just me being lazy, and not testing my code enough :D But I've fixed that piece of code and tested it and it works fine now. Remembering the character and costume sounds like a good feature, I'll include it in the next release.

Thanks for all the help and support, its what's keeps me going :D
More of my art available at DeviantART.
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BPzeBanshee
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Re: Aero Flux - Bullet Hell Shooter

Post by BPzeBanshee »

3 pixels seems incredibly small. It's usually the width/height of the actual sprite. You want to be *promoting* point-blanking so that you get the idea during the first stage rather than being *punished* and having this huge swarm of bullets suddenly appear on top of you because you didn't place your ship precisely enough while there's all this other shit on the screen. :P

Thought there was something oddball about the stars. Do they also only appear when they're at the bottom half of the screen or something?
ZenoDLC
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Re: Aero Flux - Bullet Hell Shooter

Post by ZenoDLC »

one thing it lacks the most, a story, I mean, even Touhou have one, can't this one be "A neo-nazi army appeared and conquered the whole world easily with their alien tech and the characters are girls that happen to find a battle-type spaceship somewhere (Probably a prototype made by Yamaha on Miku's case) and the ship said that their DNA Data match the Biopassword (Biological Password) for the ship and they end up being the only ones who can stop the neo-nazis" type of story or something?
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BPzeBanshee
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Re: Aero Flux - Bullet Hell Shooter

Post by BPzeBanshee »

Actually this game has a very excellent story.

Blow shit up, or die.

Super cool story bro. ;)
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RNGmaster
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Re: Aero Flux - Bullet Hell Shooter

Post by RNGmaster »

You made an account to complain about the lack of story in a T&A bullet hell shmup?
lrdr
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Re: Aero Flux - Bullet Hell Shooter

Post by lrdr »

I made an account to complain about the guy complaining about the lack of story

Also, this game is really really good and a nice surprise. Loving all the imagination on display when it comes to the player's attacks (the fourth girl's bomb is a great idea, although the bullets should probably turn a different colour a la Mars Matrix to demonstrate they're safe now). The presentation is really impressive, and I like the music quite a lot, especially stage 2's.
My only real complaints are that the first girl has a stupid slack jawed look to her - breathe through your nose dear - and that Game Maker can't scale up to fullscreen worth a damn. I wish I had a friend to play 2p with as well (that aside, it is nice to see a fan game that acknowledges it's players could have mates).
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Rozyrg
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Re: Aero Flux - Bullet Hell Shooter

Post by Rozyrg »

RNGmaster wrote:story in a T&A bullet hell shmup
That alone gave me so many glorious/awful/sexist ideas. :lol:
"Trip to the lingerie/beachwear shop gets out of hand", "Evil alien steals wardrobe", "Race to compete in an intergalactic beauty pageant" etc.
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BPzeBanshee
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Re: Aero Flux - Bullet Hell Shooter

Post by BPzeBanshee »

Speaking of T&A, the new Character Select portraits for Aero Flux [Radical Proposal] (subject to change once I get a version of GIMP that doesn't gimp Photoshop layer techniques):
ImageImageImageImage

They're hopefully meant to look a bit more satanic and therefore badass compared to their normally coloured counterparts. A keen eye will notice some of the polishing is a bit faded thanks to GIMP doing weird things with those layers as well as Hatsune Miku having some kind of special effect stuff going on that just would not work in GIMPshop so I removed them. The hair on on the first lady could probably be better as it took me a while to get something remotely fitting, and there's actually lines and spots where the background peeks through ie on line effects but I like the result so far.

Of course I'll add an option to not show these at all eventually and I put the recommendation to Pieterator in an email the other day. As it is now Radical Proposal has pretty much eradicated the old 640x480 format so you'll only ever see them in Character Select anyway.
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pieterator
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Re: Aero Flux - Bullet Hell Shooter

Post by pieterator »

@BPzeBanshee Wow, the new colour pallet looks amazing, it really looks like they are from another dimension :D But yes, I knew you would not be able to render the layer effects of Photoshop in Gimp, but everything else will work fine. And again, the red looks awesome. I'll look at increasing the dead zones for the enemies to the size of the sprite.

About the story, I actually had something very basic planned, but I'm going to have to cut some things if I ever want to finish this game. Once I finish stage 5, that's it, game done, next project please :D Maybe then I'll make a little RPG with a nice fleshed out story, about aliens raiding a lingerie store, in Neo-Nazi Japan, on Mars. :mrgreen:

Thanks for all the feedback guys.
More of my art available at DeviantART.
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BPzeBanshee
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Re: Aero Flux - Bullet Hell Shooter

Post by BPzeBanshee »

pieterator wrote:@BPzeBanshee Wow, the new colour pallet looks amazing, it really looks like they are from another dimension :D But yes, I knew you would not be able to render the layer effects of Photoshop in Gimp, but everything else will work fine. And again, the red looks awesome. I'll look at increasing the dead zones for the enemies to the size of the sprite.
Glad I could please. :D
The only issue with them now is the transparent lines, because your polish effects showed up all black instead of transparent and by making them transparent I think I erased some black parts I shouldntve in GIMPshop. You'll see what I mean if you stick those on a background of ie. blue colour I imagine.

On my end I'm not sure about the size of the sprite as the deadzone as I'm still actually tweaking it for Radical Proposal - if it's the size of the sprite it still remains exponential to the actual enemy object which I've noticed has had detrimental results (I die unexpectedly). I'm definitely interested in trying to get the backgrounds to scroll at the end of the stage and make the bosses a bit more interesting. Of course Stage 2 does this already but Stage 3's boat just sits there and I've got a few ideas for making it interesting given time.

One other thing, though considering I'm pedantic about this kind of thing it was to be expected: your drawing of text is insane on performance requirements and from my testing seem to make up a good chunk of the game's requirements. I think if you were to make sprite-based fonts using Font Express like I have you might be able to come up with text that does exactly the same thing as your current stuff does (black borders, and then just use a single colour command) and increase performance.
ZenoDLC
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Re: Aero Flux - Bullet Hell Shooter

Post by ZenoDLC »

I did not make it to complain about the lack of story, I only make this account to tell what's in my mind, and it just happen to be my first post here, and I haven't found any other game that directs me here.
BTW, I noticed that Miku's hitbox's a few pixel away from the middle of her cockpit, is that on purpose?
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pieterator
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Re: Aero Flux - Bullet Hell Shooter

Post by pieterator »

@BPzeBanshee Thanks for the link to Font Express! This just makes creating fonts so easy, this is such a great tool. Guess who's game is getting a "Fonts" directory :D

@ZenoDLC No probs, it's all good :D I'm going to change the hitboxes of the fighters to fit the cockpit neatly, but unfortunately it's still going to be off centre when banking. Either that, or I'll have to make the ships rotate around their cockpits (instead of their centre of gravity) which looks a bit off.
More of my art available at DeviantART.
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Rozyrg
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Re: Aero Flux - Bullet Hell Shooter

Post by Rozyrg »

pieterator wrote:Maybe then I'll make a little RPG with a nice fleshed out story, about aliens raiding a lingerie store, in Neo-Nazi Japan, on Mars. :mrgreen:
I would so do something like that too if I had infinite free time. :lol:
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DrInfy
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Re: Aero Flux - Bullet Hell Shooter

Post by DrInfy »

You really should make the game area slowly shift based on horizontal player movement like almost every commercial shmup does.
Something like this (I have no idea about the syntax in game maker):
gameareaCenter.X = player.X / 10;
when the player is a 2 dimensional vector based on player center position. It should make the game feel a lot better instead of what the current version has. Also the ships kinda need a third picture for half tilt, as the ships look pretty lifeless and unresponsive with only 2 pictures.

Also the bomb for Haruko Hiso perhaps shouldn't block the whole screen, it gets kinda confusing to be blacked out of the game completely for so long.
Saviors, a modern vertical shoot 'em up.
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BPzeBanshee
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Re: Aero Flux - Bullet Hell Shooter

Post by BPzeBanshee »

The wobble scrolling you're referring to is a point I was considering working on for Radical Proposal as that's a thing I have issues with too. Thing is the scrolling works a little differently from what you and I both are used to (though your syntax is pretty right Aero Flux if memory serves moves the view by a set amount of steps based on player input not by per-frame step event) so I'm not sure it'll be so easy to pull off.

Definitely something to look into though. As it stands it's a possible source of motion sickness - not that it stopped Raiden or the Toaplan games from doing it that way.
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Rozyrg
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Re: Aero Flux - Bullet Hell Shooter

Post by Rozyrg »

BPzeBanshee wrote:As it stands it's a possible source of motion sickness
No kidding, especially if things are moving fast. The main problem I had with implementing this in my own games was finding something that would work with any number of different movement speeds, since I prefer to let the player assign that for themselves. A problem worth overcoming; but yeah, not so easy to pull off.

If it's too slow, it takes too much time to reach the far edges of the game area. Too fast (or too much in synch with your ship's speed), and, well, you can get nauseous.
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pieterator
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Re: Aero Flux - Bullet Hell Shooter

Post by pieterator »

Hi guys, thanks for all the feedback, but you're going to have to help me out a little here, as I'm not completely sure what you mean with the horizontal movement.

Should the screen slowly accelerate to the max scrolling speed. Should the stage be fixed and not scroll left and right at all?

Can you maybe give me an example of a game that illustrates this?
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DrInfy
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Re: Aero Flux - Bullet Hell Shooter

Post by DrInfy »

pieterator wrote:Hi guys, thanks for all the feedback, but you're going to have to help me out a little here, as I'm not completely sure what you mean with the horizontal movement.

Should the screen slowly accelerate to the max scrolling speed. Should the stage be fixed and not scroll left and right at all?

Can you maybe give me an example of a game that illustrates this?
Horizontal movement as in sideways, left and right. I think every vertical Cave game does the horizontal movement I was talking about, Dodonpachi being one solid example.
Saviors, a modern vertical shoot 'em up.
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Rozyrg
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Re: Aero Flux - Bullet Hell Shooter

Post by Rozyrg »

pieterator wrote:I'm not completely sure what you mean with the horizontal movement.
Basically, when you move left or right, the background will pan with you to reveal more area on the far sides. Obviously you want ground objects moving in synch with this; but bullets and other stuff in the air you might want to move at a different rate to give a sense of depth. It really depends on who you talk to.

As for examples, here's one that always comes to mind for me since the Xenocide review complained about all the stuff 'hiding on the sides'. :lol:

Like I said, though, it takes some nuance and lots of troubleshooting to get right (which I don't pretend to have done at all.) Granted it's a cool feature to have and would certainly be one more step towards having that "true arcade feel"; but I don't know if it'd be worth a serious overhaul just to squeeze it in. Maybe try it out to see how much/little of a hassle it would be; but you might want to just save it for the sequel. ;)
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DrInfy
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Re: Aero Flux - Bullet Hell Shooter

Post by DrInfy »

I was thinking that as already has some sort of horizontal background movement implemented, it wouldn't be too much work to make it work "properly", but I just now remembered that it isn't quite so simple when there are two players on the field. Thanks btw for explaining it properly, I was kinda loss for words on how to explain what that horizontal movement was all about.
Saviors, a modern vertical shoot 'em up.
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Y2135
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Re: Aero Flux - Bullet Hell Shooter

Post by Y2135 »

With two players you have to calculate a point on the straight line between two player ships and move view according to it's coordinates instead of player ship's. Not hard at all.
Quality is crap but notice how playing area shifts as player moves. I suppose it's that thing you guys were talking about: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kawqB0-i9kw
... development log: http://y2135.blog.com/
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pieterator
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Re: Aero Flux - Bullet Hell Shooter

Post by pieterator »

Just to confirm that I am still slowly but surely working on Aero Flux :mrgreen:

At the moment I'm redoing all the girls in pixel art to better complement the game. See the progress below.

Image
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BPzeBanshee
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Re: Aero Flux - Bullet Hell Shooter

Post by BPzeBanshee »

I'm not sure I understand. What's wrong with the current graphics?
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Ebbo
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Re: Aero Flux - Bullet Hell Shooter

Post by Ebbo »

Maybe it's just that current portraits look too clean when compared with the actual in-game graphics. I already prefer those rough sketches and I appreciate that you toned down the amount of T&A as well :wink:
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Grindie
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Re: Aero Flux - Bullet Hell Shooter

Post by Grindie »

Love those graphics, man. The presentation, how meaty everything feels. I like it! Good stuff! Great music too. Recognised the Burnout theme (was it Burnout 1 or 2?) from the title screen.

I'd love some control pad support. S'pose I could just use JoytoKey for now though.
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