Cosmic Fighters 2 Gameplay Vid: Opinions and Concerns please

[Kaleb Parham]

Cosmic Fighters 2 is an indie horizontal shump that Ive been working on for nearly five years.
Before you read or watch the vid, I would just like to say that there is a list of things never to do in a shump. Yeah... I broke a few of those. Namely, the game is an shump with RPG features and I am applying a healthbar.
Now on to gameplay. There's a lot going on in this game. Its very complex for a shump, especially an arcade style shump. Not to say you need a dictionary to play it, it just has a few extra features in it that make it a bit strange to hardcore shump gamers. The game has both stages involving purely shooting enemies (similar to ProGear without all the bullets) as well as stages in which the player must navigate terrain (similar to Gradius and R-Type, except touching the terrain normally won't kill you).
The game uses six buttons. That's right, SIX. However, three of them rotate your weapons around. There is also an autofire button, a charge power button (MegaMan style), and a shield button. The shield functions as a very small protective circle that either destroys bullets, slows them, or bounces them away (although some attacks can go through the shield without any effect).
The shield can be used an unlimited amount of times, but only one can be placed down at a time. Once it is placed down, you're stuck with that one for a second or two. Once that shield disappears, you still have to wait a bit before another shield can be dropped. This means the shield must be strategically placed down and not just spammed to protect you cheaply. The shield type is chosen at the beginning of the game, which simply effects how the shield will function once deployed.
There are a total of three playable characters: each character has five weapons, each weapon has a charge variant, and each player can power up to 12 power levels via the RPG EXP system. The Nova's weaponry focuses primarily on reach. Every weapon it has is designed to allow the Nova to cover an extremely large portion of the playfield. The Heart Fighter (coming from Cosmic Fighters 1) is the strength hog of the game. All of its weapons are designed for power, even though it moves slower than the other fighters. The Hova is a more bizarre ship. All of it's weapons are designed to be high risk but high reward weapons. In other words, its hard to master this ship, but mastering it gives you some sort of extra incentive.
Anyway, here is some gameplay of it I recorded because I want peoples opinions. I know I'm moving in a certain direction, and I like where I'm going, but I want to see how hardcore shump fans feel about it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uD0GSuS5y4

[trap15]

Afraid to touch this one. If you want the most scathing and unfiltered opinion possible, let me know, otherwise I'll refrain from saying anything, lest moderator action be applied.

[railslave]

[Formless God]

shump

did you do that on purpose

[Cagar]

Troll post
This game is 5 years by one person: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mF5rePrqQjk

[Kaleb Parham]

Guess I should have warned you guys its kind of a cute em up, or at least it starts that way. The game gets progressively creepier as you go along. Not scary, just creepier.

[Kaleb Parham]

shump

did you do that on purpose

Lol I typed this entire thing at like 3 in the morning.

[Cagar]

Are you even serious?

[Kaleb Parham]

Are you even serious?

Serious about what?

[trap15]

This weekend is going to be fun

[n0rtygames]

n0rtygames used the power of olive branch ! ! !

There is not enough to go on in the video - despite the lengthy gameplay you've put on display.

This is mostly because we can't see what's going on due to the extremely low framerate. It looks like you've actually got some neat mechanics in there. Do I see some sort of bullet attraction mechanic going on during the boss fight? Not too bad - though I'd probably look at upping the bullet count to make that more satisfying.

Sound wise - that laser has to change, but the crunchy explosions sound nice.

Graphically - it's not very good. But that's okay, Giest118 has made some games that quite frankly look ugly at a first glance. The games he makes are good if you like that sort of bullet hell thing though - so it would be wrong for us to discount your game based on the video you've provided.

Get a playable demo up - let us see it and give you feedback, or provide a video that has a better framerate if you're able.

Just be warned, these people don't hold back. You can expect a witchhunt on your hands if you really want serious feedback - just remember, if you were making this game commercially - the public would be very unforgiving and for what it's worth, the people on here actually know their shit. Feedback from these mad bastards will help you on one condition:- You have to listen to and accept the feedback given when it finally comes

With that in mind.. see if you can give us something to actually comment on, because we really can't do much based on this like I've said!

[Ixmucane2]

A few annoyances:

• The "sword" featured at the beginning of the video has to spin much faster: you kill enemies with it in in what appear like head-on collisions between your ship's nose and an enemy. The behaviour is right, but the graphics are wrong: unlike your sword, a dazzling whirl of laser death would never point in the wrong direction.
  You could also go the other way: the swords is held forward and a button swings it once, fast and in a decently wide forward arc. A game whose name escapes me lets the player throw back shots with such an attack, baseball style.
• If you use tiles, keep them aligned to a grid. It means drawing more graphics for curves and slopes, but everybody expects tiles to be neat.
• Some graphics are too ugly, even for placeholder art. For example, the penis-like green snakes need to become less suggestive (maybe with an open mouth showings tongue and fangs).

Why do you need three buttons to switch weapons?

[Kaleb Parham]

Why do you need three buttons to switch weapons?

During the testing of controls, I realized that two buttons to rotate through the weapons didn't work when you really wanted to get to certain weapons. It works for slower paced stages and sections, but some areas, such as the cornfield for example, requires you that you use multiple weapons to survive. Rotating weapons around meant I had to either design the stages around the rotation, which eventually becomes predictable, boring, and repetitive, or give enough dead space for the player to rotate along with a "switch to this weapon" which many modern games do, I ain't doin that at all. So having three buttons to switch through the five weapons is a bit more effective. It's easier to double tap one button as opposed to cycling through three times, passing the weapon, now having to go back. It's a speed issue.

Thanks for the other feedback too. I've gotten so many complaints about the graphics it isn't even funny. Sadly, they're better than my other games majority of the time. I'm working on spicing the graphics up. Truth be told, I want a much more animated feel, so hopefully it'll look like a cartoon when it's finished.

[Kaleb Parham]

n0rtygames used the power of olive branch ! ! !

There is not enough to go on in the video - despite the lengthy gameplay you've put on display.

This is mostly because we can't see what's going on due to the extremely low framerate. It looks like you've actually got some neat mechanics in there. Do I see some sort of bullet attraction mechanic going on during the boss fight? Not too bad - though I'd probably look at upping the bullet count to make that more satisfying.

Sound wise - that laser has to change, but the crunchy explosions sound nice.

Graphically - it's not very good. But that's okay, Giest118 has made some games that quite frankly look ugly at a first glance. The games he makes are good if you like that sort of bullet hell thing though - so it would be wrong for us to discount your game based on the video you've provided.

Get a playable demo up - let us see it and give you feedback, or provide a video that has a better framerate if you're able.

Just be warned, these people don't hold back. You can expect a witchhunt on your hands if you really want serious feedback - just remember, if you were making this game commercially - the public would be very unforgiving and for what it's worth, the people on here actually know their shit. Feedback from these mad bastards will help you on one condition:- You have to listen to and accept the feedback given when it finally comes

With that in mind.. see if you can give us something to actually comment on, because we really can't do much based on this like I've said!

It was better on my pc. IDK what happened when I uploaded it to Youtube. hmmm. There is a demo out, but it is of the really really old build. You'll get a basic feel for the game, but a lot has changed since then. I'm looking into making the graphics better now since that is the number one complaint. Most people don't even mention gameplay, even in the demo, the complaint was always graphics.
Here is the demo: http://sandbox.yoyogames.com/games/1893 ... s-2-demo-2
As far as no one holding back, bro, Im used to that in real life. Honestly that's what I was hoping for. Just as long as no one insults me and it's constructive criticism, it's all good.