scalegunner -- multilayer boss rush STG | 0.1 pre-alpha

[null1024]

0.1 pre-alpha download

scalegunner [no caps, ever] is a little STG I'm working on. Inspired by RayForce and Alien Soldier, it is planned to have 10 bosses, each being large, multisegment behemoths that move and scale and dodge under bullets.

Bullets can come in through any layer, and will move upwards on the Z axis to reach the player's level if need be. Bullets beneath the player are a muted color, and cannot damage the player. The bosses may fire bullet walls that require the player to move past them before they reach the player's layer, etc.

I'm still planning a secondary weapon.

Videos [a little older than the 0.1 pre-alpha release]
May 2nd progress:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFpAqmhweW0

May 1st progress:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1diOLt_SR28

Sorry about the framerate [both the actual and the video's, it's being developed on my netbook], and it's being made with GM5.3, known for being atrociously slow. I'm almost certain doing a GM8 port would drastically speed things up [and hell, I mightn't need to change much if anything, I think I don't have any of the GM5 to 6+ compatibility issues [like using view_left]], but eh.

Compatible with every version of Windows from 98 to 8.
Pre-alpha released. Contains preliminary first boss and one form of the second.
.gmd provided, beware [everything is done in a fairly ad-hoc way, I really should get around to cleaning it up a bit before I add anything else, also it's mostly uncommented]

[BareKnuckleRoo]

holy shit that background is trippy and AWESOME

It looks hard to tell which bullets are 'threatening', as in which can actually hit you; some of the bullets in the background go offscreen without ever reaching the foreground. It's easier to keep track of them for certain attacks where the enemy is visibly in the background and fires into the foreground (I know Strania's Side Vower has one boss that does this, I've played a few other shmups with shots that fire from the background only to explode in a visible damaging area you have to dodge) when they reach the foreground, but those patterns. The wobbling of the boss in and out of the background makes it rather chaotic, so I guess the real challenge is going to be to design the bullet patterns around the theme.

[null1024]

It looks hard to tell which bullets are 'threatening', as in which can actually hit you; some of the bullets in the background go offscreen without ever reaching the foreground. It's easier to keep track of them for certain attacks where the enemy is visibly in the background and fires into the foreground (I know Strania's Side Vower has one boss that does this, I've played a few other shmups with shots that fire from the background only to explode in a visible damaging area you have to dodge) when they reach the foreground, but those patterns. The wobbling of the boss in and out of the background makes it rather chaotic, so I guess the real challenge is going to be to design the bullet patterns around the theme.

Yeah, I had thought it'd be off-putting at first when I originally implemented it, but after a few runs, it seemed pretty natural. Some of the bullets do go away without reaching the top, I don't exactly like that, but that's due to how low the boss is when the shot is fired, they rise fairly slowly.
For some of the shots, it's just better to dodge even if it's currently beneath you, because it'll be on your layer in a few frames.
Not every boss will be as crazy with motion as this one, some will do a more traditional drop down/fire a special rising pattern/rise/do normal pattern thing. I made it slower before and not as deep, but the fight was less interesting for it.


You'll be able to check it out for yourself either tomorrow or the day after, I hope to put enough polish for an alpha release.


and yeah, I love my background
Gonna have the backgrounds seamlessly change between bosses too, you'll go down the tunnel shaft in stage one, over the underground city in stage 2, etc, etc.

[BPzeBanshee]

Oooo, very nice. And GM5.1 too.

Sprite scaling-based gameplay had been something I attempted to start doing in GMOSSE as an additional visual gimmick but this takes the concept a LOT further. I'm definitely keen to test this as soon as I get time.

[Nana]

This looks awesome. Can't wait to get to play the alpha. So ARE you going to be doing the Game Maker 8 port then? Low framerates in shmups always do get to me, I can't lie.

[eebrozgi]

The crazy animations in this game remind me of Siter Skain shmups. And that is awesome.

[null1024]

This looks awesome. Can't wait to get to play the alpha. So ARE you going to be doing the Game Maker 8 port then? Low framerates in shmups always do get to me, I can't lie.

I'm probably not. Especially since the game is coded for 45fps now, so I'd have to go edit all my speed constants everywhere for a the potential 60fps experience that GM6/7/8's optimizations would allow for. I originally started coding at 50fps [I knew I wasn't hitting 60 on this thing], but only just a few things on screen murder the framerate [I've noticed that after about 80 3D-scaled objects, things go to hell].
On a reasonably fast machine, there should never be a framedrop, especially since I'm trying to target a steady 45 on this netbook.

Also, I'm uploading the pre-alpha later tonight [maybe, I may get pulled away to do other things, but it's not like there's any real rush for a release ], once the second boss is implemented proper. There's now music and SFX implemented!

Here's a better video, showing some of the little polish changes between yesterday and today: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFpAqmhweW0 [done earlier today, missing a bunch of changes]

Oooo, very nice. And GM5.1 too.

Sprite scaling-based gameplay had been something I attempted to start doing in GMOSSE as an additional visual gimmick but this takes the concept a LOT further. I'm definitely keen to test this as soon as I get time.

It wasn't terribly difficult, but I'm willing to say it'd be fairly slowish, I'm doing proper 3D positioning for the most part, and each object has a bunch of calculations being done on it. It originally was going to be just a visual thing, but having objects actively move through 3D space seemed neat.

The crazy animations in this game remind me of Siter Skain shmups. And that is awesome.

Ahaha, yeah. I bought Kamui after it came up in that Rayforce or Soukygurentai thread, the Nyu Media release, so I'm just waiting for June[?] when that comes out. Really sexy, hope I can channel some of that.

[BPzeBanshee]

So proper 3D in GM with 2D sprites then....I managed to come up with a Gekirindan Stage 1 tube effect doing actual 3D with a cylinder and just assigning a texture to it, and the asteroids using my GMOSSE sprites (which at the time were round) looked pretty sweet. I couldn't get it working consistently across computers though so I gave up on expanding it any further: the distance between cylinders as they spawned seemed to want to be different, the space backgrounds distance was different and it was especially broken-looking on my legacy PC (graphics card driver thing maybe, but other 3D stuff on it had worked in the past).

I hope you have better luck than me anyway. Looking forward to testing this.

[null1024]

Pre-alpha released, see first post.

[Ebbo]

Alien Soldier-ish boss rush shmup? Count me in!

After giving the demo a try I can see a solid foundation there (those scaling effects are pretty cool indeed) although it didn't quite yet sell me the idea behind those multilayered bullets. Obviously the demo is quite alpha but I'd have liked to see atleast some of that gimmick's potential instead of just bullets suddenly "appearing" from the background and hitting me. I did find estimating bullets' depth somewhat hard, it could use better visual feedback. How about a thin circle around each background bullet that gradually reduces in size as the bullet closes in the actual playing field or something?

I'm certainly keeping my eye on this one. I'd love to see what kind of tricks those bosses are going to use...

[null1024]

Obviously the demo is quite alpha but I'd have liked to see atleast some of that gimmick's potential instead of just bullets suddenly "appearing" from the background and hitting me. I did find estimating bullets' depth somewhat hard, it could use better visual feedback. How about a thin circle around each background bullet that gradually reduces in size as the bullet closes in the actual playing field or something?

This is why I released the demo so early, I needed some feedback, thanks!
Yeah, estimating depth was a bit hard [imagine if there was some way I could make this game for a 3D display... that'd immediately solve the depth problem :Y].

I'm actually tempted to have the bullets draw circles where they would be on the player's layer, so you can estimate their Z position better. I'm also going to make it so that deep bullets are more distinctive than those almost near the surface [right now, they light just about when they get to your Z layer, 3 stages of depth coloring would help a great deal].

The depth gimmick will be used a bit better hopefully, I'm just now getting to grips with the potential usage of bullets that can go under you. Once I mix in other bullet types, it'll hopefully make the concept more appealing. Also, low bullets will interfere with low player shots when I implement that [and it'll probably charge for more power/z-range when the player isn't firing, I kept thinking that there's no reason to have a shoot button if there isn't a reason to not be shooting ].

also, I really want pattern feedback ;-;

[Meseki]

I agree that there should be some sort of gradual change or some sort of indicator so you can tell if a bullet is about half a second away from being a threat or a few frames away.

As for patterns, the pattern of the second boss is definitely easier than the first boss' pattern. For the first boss, I had to mostly stay to the side just to live long enough to get to the second boss with one life. Tap dodging works decently well on the second boss, but the first boss has a more complex pattern, as it has a fixed part and what seems to be an aimed shot that doesn't come from the center.

Also, including the .gmd was not necessary.

[null1024]

I agree that there should be some sort of gradual change or some sort of indicator so you can tell if a bullet is about half a second away from being a threat or a few frames away.

As for patterns, the pattern of the second boss is definitely easier than the first boss' pattern. For the first boss, I had to mostly stay to the side just to live long enough to get to the second boss with one life. Tap dodging works decently well on the second boss, but the first boss has a more complex pattern, as it has a fixed part and what seems to be an aimed shot that doesn't come from the center.

Also, including the .gmd was not necessary.

I always include source. Not like it's actually readable though, being damn-near uncommented.
Originally in development, the second boss's pattern was a lot harder [very fast and very dense aimed stream + fixed pattern, almost overlapping, and quite often on the player's layer], but I toned it way down. Maybe too much, I'll adjust that segment [it's only part of the second boss, I need to implement its option orbs that'll fire and shield]. As the developer, I might have gotten too used to the first boss [even if it kills me sometimes], but hey. I could just move its order [although, I'd hate to have to rework the stage transition], or make it easier [but I really like its pattern, it reminds me a bit of the Stage 3 boss from Cho Ren Sha now that I think of it, even though I didn't even try for that].

And the first boss doesn't aim shots from anywhere but its middle, but the dense-ish stream from its arms after it's at 30% health feels like they're aimed. Staying to the side is a good strategy, the player's shot is wide enough to let you still hit it a little. I might make it a little less aggressive in the middle, but make it aim for the sides more, and have more aimed shots. I don't have the luxury of lots of slow bullets, the game's framerate dives to 35-40fps on my netbook after 80 objects or so.

Thanks for the comments! I'll put up a new alpha release once I implement the second boss's other patterns, start the third boss, and implement a solution for the bullet layer issue.


Also, I could use Enigma [which compiles GM6/7/8[?] games into native C++, huge speed boost], but that doesn't support object inheritance yet [and a handful of other GM features], which I used heavily when making this... siiiigh.