Super Space Shooter !

[xarn]

Hi !

It's my first time posting here. I'm currently developing a space shooter, here is a screenshot:



And you can play it here:

http://sss-demo.site11.com/

It's still "in development" but already fully playable.
The unusual about it is that everything is generated randomly: the enemies, the bosses, the background, the weapons, etc.
However, it still requires some fine tuning and it lacks a "je ne sais quoi". If you think something sucks about it and should definitely be improved, just go ahead! I'm open to any improvement suggestion, let me make a game you enjoy!
(Btw, the tyrian music in the BG is just placeholder)

Cheers,
Arnaud

[Suslik]

I played it for a few minutes on max difficulty - 1 and it was boring. Some ways to make it less boring:
*drastically changing the game pace(5x faster perhaps?)
*greatly increasing amount of bullets
or both

The game screen is too large for my monitor and about 1/4 must remain out of visible range.

I would also point out that the shooting doesn't take place in space as expected from a space shooter, but i guess this will be changed.

[xarn]

Ok!
Here you go!
...I made more enemies, faster, upgraded the starting gun and even resized it smaller to fit your screen! Heck, I even made bigger explosions!
Any better?

[BareKnuckleRoo]

If you destroy a line of enemies at once and a bunch of explosions play at the same time, it produces a really grating sound compared to a 'clean' explosion. If you look at arcade shmups, they generally have a limit to the number of explosion sound effects (like when you're destroying a bunch of small enemies) that can play at the same time, cutting off the 'oldest' explosion sound to play the newest one.

The hardest difficulty starts you off in a nigh impossible situation - your gun is too weak to deal with enemies in a timely fashion, and the enemies too dense to handle effectively. Simply upping enemy health is a bad way of increasing the difficulty in a shmup, particularly for midstage enemies who end up swamping the screen if they're impossible to kill at a reasonable pace. A good way of changing the difficulty without breaking the pacing of a level or screwing up powerup progression balance is to up the number of enemies that appear or change the bullets patterns themselves. Boss fights are okay to raise health on, namely because if it's just the boss you're fighting, you can concentrate on it regardless of how much health it has and not worry about other enemies filling the screen up. This is generally how modern shmups tend to change difficulty (Touhou games change patterns with increasing difficulty, but midstage enemies have the same health and appear at the same spots, Cave games change shot patterns everywhere and increase boss health with higher difficulties, but don't mess with normal enemy health, so the level pacing is the same regardless of difficulty).

Ship speed feels a bit too slow at higher difficulties, and the hitbox size too unforgiving. I was playing on a fairly high difficulty and a midboss showed up, and its otherwise easy pattern murdered me simply because my ship was so large that the bullets would clip me on the edges.

I assume that you're a big Tyrian fan based on the amount of resources you used as placeholders, but I'd suggest looking at more modern shmups for inspiration too. There's a lot of good things about Tyrian like its diverse weapon set, but it also did a lot of outright bad things like its horrible inertia, the bouncyness when you get hit, the rather large hitbox size, etc.

Random levels feels odd, especially when you have a level select map. It makes sense for a bonus 'endless' mode like in noiz2sa's endless modes, but not when you have a level select map. I'd also suggest making fixed levels rather than randomization... it's a lot harder to make a good game that just throws out random enemy sets at you, because it can easily just feel like a sloppy way to avoid making levels. By making levels with specific enemy waves you can think about what kind of formations would be fun to throw at the player, and have a more deliberate pace to the game.

[Suslik]

The game can be fully visible now when going to fullscreen mode with the browser. It is slightly better i would say. I played until stage3 this time, then it got too repetitive.

[xarn]

Cool, thanks for feedback to both of you!

If you destroy a line of enemies at once and a bunch of explosions play at the same time, it produces a really grating sound compared to a 'clean' explosion. If you look at arcade shmups, they generally have a limit to the number of explosion sound effects (like when you're destroying a bunch of small enemies) that can play at the same time, cutting off the 'oldest' explosion sound to play the newest one.

...for the sounds, I noticed it too. I think that's a limit of HTML5 I already use several different channels for explosions and sounds that I "recycle" but it seems it produces garbage when too many are playing simultaneously. I feel a bit helpless here but I'll look at it again anyway.

The hardest difficulty starts you off in a nigh impossible situation - your gun is too weak to deal with enemies in a timely fashion, and the enemies too dense to handle effectively. Simply upping enemy health is a bad way of increasing the difficulty in a shmup, particularly for midstage enemies who end up swamping the screen if they're impossible to kill at a reasonable pace. A good way of changing the difficulty without breaking the pacing of a level or screwing up powerup progression balance is to up the number of enemies that appear or change the bullets patterns themselves. Boss fights are okay to raise health on, namely because if it's just the boss you're fighting, you can concentrate on it regardless of how much health it has and not worry about other enemies filling the screen up. This is generally how modern shmups tend to change difficulty (Touhou games change patterns with increasing difficulty, but midstage enemies have the same health and appear at the same spots, Cave games change shot patterns everywhere and increase boss health with higher difficulties, but don't mess with normal enemy health, so the level pacing is the same regardless of difficulty).
Ship speed feels a bit too slow at higher difficulties, and the hitbox size too unforgiving. I was playing on a fairly high difficulty and a midboss showed up, and its otherwise easy pattern murdered me simply because my ship was so large that the bullets would clip me on the edges.

Point noted for enemies health, I'll try to take that into account. For the speed, you ship will get faster with time since you can have add speed boosters to it ...and it can be fairly fast so I preferred to keep in modest at start. It was the same thought with the gun but I guess I put the starting point too low. When making the game, I also had a look at other popular casual flash shooters, and they seemed fairly slow paced as well:
http://www.kongregate.com/games/IriySof ... -commander
http://www.kongregate.com/games/matakuk ... space-wars
but I guess you're more hardcore shmups fan and you don't like those, right? I mean, they are slow paced, don't have many bullets, etc.

...that being said, perhaps I can split it in faster ships and shooting ships to avoid the more "slow-and-not-shooting-boring-ships".

I assume that you're a big Tyrian fan based on the amount of resources you used as placeholders, but I'd suggest looking at more modern shmups for inspiration too. There's a lot of good things about Tyrian like its diverse weapon set, but it also did a lot of outright bad things like its horrible inertia, the bouncyness when you get hit, the rather large hitbox size, etc.

Yeah, it's true, it was one of the shooters in my youth. ...and actually, I used the tyrant art because it's freely available
http://www.lostgarden.com/2007/04/free- ... s-and.html
...currently, I'm not in the position to pay an artist to make awesome graphics, so I do with what I can get. ...and it's really tough. I spent soo much time on developing that game, yet it's still not really there.

Random levels feels odd, especially when you have a level select map. It makes sense for a bonus 'endless' mode like in noiz2sa's endless modes, but not when you have a level select map. I'd also suggest making fixed levels rather than randomization... it's a lot harder to make a good game that just throws out random enemy sets at you, because it can easily just feel like a sloppy way to avoid making levels. By making levels with specific enemy waves you can think about what kind of formations would be fun to throw at the player, and have a more deliberate pace to the game.

Yeah, there is kind of story attached to that. I started by designing the levels by hand, deciding which formation should appear when, etc. But after several of levels, inspiration became lacking and similar to randomness despite endless tweaking. You can't imagine how boring it feels to test the same level HUNDREDS of times, because that's what I have to do. So at least now, when I test, I got a bit of diversity due to the randomness. :p


That being, here is another idea/concept. It's a drastic evolution but I think it's feasible.

What if players could make their own levels and play those of others?
Imagine you could make your own level by designing the enemy ships and when they appear, in what formation, direction, etc.
Then, you could also play the levels of others, of various difficulty. What do you think of this concept?

[xarn]

For example, what do you think if you could build custom ships like this:
http://sss-demo.site11.com/build/

[xarn]

The sound should be better now!
...I also removed the background since it made low fps on low end pcs.