Trigonometry Wars 4
It's vaguely inspired by the DonPachi series and Crimzon Clover, but is mostly its own thing. The mechanics of the main game are pretty simple: Kill enemies and collect the stars they drop to raise your multiplier. The multiplier will slowly decrease, so you want to keep collecting stars and killing enemies faster than it can go down. You can stall it by hitting enemies with your laser.
I'll stress, however, that this is NOT a chaining system; the multiplier doesn't decrease nearly fast enough to call it "chaining." But I hear you ask: "Where is the risk/reward if the multiplier doesn't decrease much, bro?" I'M GLAD YOU ASKED.
There's a few very important elements to scoring in this game: Collecting the star items dropped by enemies (which can be very dangerous in itself depending on how dedicated you are to collecting them) and the graze shield. You charge up your graze shield by staying close to bullets, and when it's full, you can press your Bomb button to activate it. It's basically seven seconds to do whatever you want without penalty, and while it's activated, point items are worth way more. This is key for both raising your multiplier quickly and for getting huge amounts of points from the next mechanic I'm about to explain...
Larger enemies cancel bullets when they're destroyed, and the bullets they cancel turn into autocollecting point items. These do not raise your multiplier, but that's made up for by the fact that there is often an obscene amount of them. If you can cancel a screen full of bullets while your graze shield is activated, the cancel by itself can be worth millions of points!
Now all this is just for the main game. With this new V1.5 release, I've added two new game modes:
Trigonometry Wars 3 Arrange
Trigonometry Wars 3 was far more inspired by DDP, and that's reflected in its chaining system. If you killed an enemy or grazed a bullet, your multiplier would increase. Go for a second without doing either of those, and your multiplier would reset to 1. It maxed out at 100.
The TW3 Arrange in this game basically takes those mechanics and tweaks them. First of all, you can also stall your multiplier by lasering enemies. Second, the multiplier maxes out at 1000 instead of 100. Third, breaking your chain won't instantly reset your multiplier to 1; instead, it just decreases really quickly. Like, 120 per second.
Another returning feature from TW3 is the ship, which had three modes of attack; at any instant you could switch between the weaker spread shot, the somewhat stronger narrow shot, and the powerful laser that slows the ship down. In TW3 each of these was assigned to a different button, but in this game, the spread shot and narrow shot are both bound to the same button; rapidly tapping the button or holding it down switches between them.
However, TW3 did not have the Graze Shield. Since that's a rather important survival mechanic in the main game, two things make up for it in this Arrange: You start with five bombs at the start of every stage, and you get deathbombs. In case that sounds like it would make things too easy, the game is locked on Insanity difficulty in this mode. Also, like TW3, there is no Continue system in this mode.
Also, TW3 Arrange mode mixed up the TLB...
Death Label
This is a True Last Boss rush. It is exactly as terrifying as it sounds.
It starts out fairly simple and doable, with a couple of original bosses that don't do anything too frightening... and then suddenly the TLB of My Little Pegasus shows up. It only gets more terrifying from there. Have fun with every TLB I've ever made! Also features cameos of Evacannia Doom and Hibachi, for those crazy enough to get past the FIRST SIX STAGES to get to them.
Wherever it's applicable for any reason, this mode is also locked on Insanity difficulty.
Changes since the original release
The aforementioned TW3 Arrange and Death Label are in the game now, but aside from that, these things have also changed:
* Configurable controls; you can bind any letters or numbers for the keyboard, and any buttons for a gamepad. However, the movement keys are locked to the keyboard/joystick.
* Added extra attacks (but NOT extra health) to several bosses to improve the pacing of those fights a bit... also changed a couple of existing patterns to make them better, and fixed the few seconds of dead air that occurs late in stage 3.
* A bunch of minor graphical changes, some of which might make mechanics way more obvious (such as the fact that you can get close to the bullet wheels in stage 7 without dying).
* Made the "good" hitboxes on the blue ship bigger (the graze/item collection hitbox and laser hitboxes). Note that its laser is NOT more powerful, it's just wider.
* Several bugfixes, including ones that I found out about even before the game's original release but forgot to fix because I'm an idiot.
* The TLB is, like, way better now.
* High scores now save every time you game over, regardless of which option you pick at the Game Over screen.
* Bomb and Extend items now move far more slowly, making it easier to get them before they leave the screen.
Where can I get this game??
Two choices!
Yoyogames:
http://sandbox.yoyogames.com/games/1959 ... try-wars-4
Dropbox:
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/28956713/Trigo ... s4V1.5.zip
Update:
If you had problems wherein the game inexplicably slowed to a crawl once you had control of the ship, I have the answer for you: Game Maker is shit at configurable controls when it comes to your computer.
I've uploaded a special version of the game exe that removes the configurable controls to address this issue. You lose configurable controls, but it will fix this issue if you came across it.
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/28956713/Trigo ... 4V1.5B.zip
Just place this exe into your Trigonometry Wars 4 folder after downloading and unzipping the main game.
Oh also random note. This is for Windows only.
The Arrow keys and Enter navigate the in-game menus, and F4 switches between fullscreen and windowed mode. Aside from that, you can map the controls yourself, but here's the defaults:
* Shot: Z
* Laser: X
* Bomb/Graze Shield: C
* Pause: Esc (cannot be remapped)
