Lunacy Star [Remake] Extra Stage Update

[Taizen Chisou]

The Extra Stage is chugging along. It's pretty grueling, actually. Resource management is key, as always.

I can't help but notice that there's a distinct trend in what shottypes people play. It seems pretty consistent, too, given a look at the high score board.
I was wondering, why people choose the shots they do?

[CStarFlare]

The Gear type has a bomb that lasts a long time and soaks up bullets for value increase. Type B because it seems to do more damage.

[Pteriforever]

It's strange, I'm usually not really into plain forward types much.

I guess I just found HydraB to be the best for taking down bosses really quickly, which is a big advantage here, and I like how the bomb hits the entire screen.

[Taizen Chisou]

Most interesting, thank you. (Next to nobody ever plays the third ship, for some reason.)

(I'll also have to ask you where the best spots for graze whoring are, CSF. You see, as of 1.0, Graze will add 10 PIV, and stop, when you hit the halfway-to-the-cap mark. The cap remains 250k+150k*difficulty.)

For today's progress:

[Pteriforever]

Looks cool :3

[Taizen Chisou]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rojz_vEFB_8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mssvf_CdxMg

Here it is.
With this, and the extra modes about to be finished, and replay implementation just one step away from existing for real-reals, version 1.0 would be right around the corner


if not for backgrounds


orz

Final version.... within the next 8 weeks perhaps.


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[Pteriforever]

Perfected all Standard attacks! I used HydraB for all of them, except those three attacks in Stage 4 where another was needed, and didn't use the bombing-beforehand exploit anywhere (: I did use overdrives though.

The hardest was 238. ~Severus~ Third Trial "Torment", which took 39 attempts.

It sucked having to play Stage 6 over and over and over again...

[Pteriforever]

And all Advanced attacks cleared!

This didn't take as long as I thought it would.

Hardest was 247. ~Accidia~ Fifth Trial "Determination" Hard, which took 20 attempts.

The first phase of the attack is very straightforward.

The second phase gave me the most trouble; in its Standard counterpart, the lasers form fairly large gaps in the center which move up and down with alternating waves, which also happens here, but here, that pattern breaks down after seven or eight waves and I need to rely on smaller gaps off to the side for the rest of the phase. I used my overdrive here.

For the third phase, my strategy is to sit in a corner and pray, which is remarkably effective. The key is to look out for anything aimed at you, and quickly duck up or to the side from the corner for just a moment.

The fourth phase is really really random, but didn't give me too much trouble. Not really any strategy there.

[Taizen Chisou]

Oh, man, is the game too easy? I was afraid of this.

I'm working at a lot of extra things as of right now. My replay emulation is 95% or so accurate. It desyncs rather fabulously after some time because it's either following actions too early or too late. I've yet to figure out which, and if the error is a result of writing things down improperly, or reading them back improperly.

I've also made a note to produce a program that will patch 0.8 score.inis to work with whatever the latest version is. I would hate to see all of your hard work go to waste, after all.
If it's not too much trouble, could I grab screencaps of your perfection records? I'm curious to see about how well the balance of the patterns works out for players that are not myself. I'm told that the game has been rendered rather easy due to Overdrives, so I've counter-balanced by cutting resources and buffing a select few patterns.
Now you can only attain a maximum of 11 lives in total in the regular game, and 6 in the Extra.
The Extra stage, by the way, is wonderfully difficult.



Note that the first three are the midboss attacks and it took until I had practiced those like 35 or 38 times before the boss was accessible.

Anyway, backgrounds will.... ahahaha! Eventually be a thing, anyway.
They're most likely going to be the very last thing that I do, all things considered. Although I should probably ask Charlie for some not-placeholder boss sprites....

[Pteriforever]

I feel that the biggest difference was actually the new long deathbomb timer. However, I don't really want to see it changed, as it's a great anti-frustration feature, since it makes it less easy to die with bombs remaining, the source of 90% of my rage at shmups.

Instead, what you're doing, reducing the number of lives, is a much better idea for returning balance.

Overdrive only makes the game as a whole a little easier, but makes it MUCH easier to capture attacks. Maybe you could make it so that it makes you lose bonus in the same way bombing or dying does? Although, then you'd run the risk of making bosses less interesting in terms of scoring possibilities.

Anyway:










Note: 147. Mystical Magic Mirrors Hard has a really easy safespot at the bottom center of the screen.







Looking forward to the Extra stage :3

One question, though. If the numbers here leave off at 252 while Extra picks up at 260, then what are 253 through 259?

[Wyrmnus]

Pretty fun game. Cleared Beginner mode just now.

[Pteriforever]

Nice ^.^

[Taizen Chisou]

I feel that the biggest difference was actually the new long deathbomb timer. However, I don't really want to see it changed, as it's a great anti-frustration feature, since it makes it less easy to die with bombs remaining, the source of 90% of my rage at shmups.

Instead, what you're doing, reducing the number of lives, is a much better idea for returning balance.

Overdrive only makes the game as a whole a little easier, but makes it MUCH easier to capture attacks. Maybe you could make it so that it makes you lose bonus in the same way bombing or dying does? Although, then you'd run the risk of making bosses less interesting in terms of scoring possibilities.

Note: 147. Mystical Magic Mirrors Hard has a really easy safespot at the bottom center of the screen.

Looking forward to the Extra stage :3

One question, though. If the numbers here leave off at 252 while Extra picks up at 260, then what are 253 through 259?

I've yet to implement the effect of Overdrives on spell bonuses. The gist of it is that using an overdrive will immediately cut the bonus remaining by half.
The numbers on attack 147 just line up that perfectly. I've been meaning to get to this, but I keep forgetting...

And, the attacks 253 through 259 are to be used in the Zero Stage, the easy, beginner's introduction to danmaku games. I have a lot of non-shmupper friends who play this game so I wanted to ease them into the experience of playing the game by teaching them a few tricks of the trade.

Pretty fun game. Cleared Beginner mode just now.

Oh wonderful. If you don't mind, I'll take the liberty of adding it to the high score thread.

...Rather, I would, if the image hadn't suddenly vanished. I'm sorry!

[Wyrmnus]

Hmm Wierd.



Heres a repost of the picture.

[Taizen Chisou]

Ah... I've run into sort of a rut...
I don't know, but there's something actively preventing me from doing much of anything with myself, and I've been sitting on what I DO have for probably too long, now.

In the meantime, y'all can have what I DO have to offer, and if I manage to go anywhere else with it, then I'll be sure to tell you whenever that happens.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/482 ... 0v0.81.zip

Inside is the updated .exe of the game, as well as music tracks 16 and 17.
The game now features the Extra Stage, and the Attacks Practice.
(Don't try to do anything with the Zero portion of the Attack Practice, the game is likely to crash.)

(Also, check the Attacks Practice after clearing the Extra stage, you may find something new.)

Another thing to note is that you should rename the 99.ogg inside the music folder to 20.ogg, and other than that, everything else should be fine. The save files are not structured differently, so those should carry over.
I look forward to seeing what people think of the Extra~


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Other changes that I've made that I may have forgot to mention:
- Hopeless difficulty is now more difficult.

[Pteriforever]

Uhh... the download link is an empty zip folder.

[Taizen Chisou]

I'm not sure what happened there, I told Dropbox to move the file into that folder but I guess it just made an empty zip.
*shrug

Well I've fixed it. Sorry about that~

[Pteriforever]

Awesome I like how you took the randomness out of item generation.

I found a few bugs though... The attack practice menu crashes if you scroll too far left or right in either direction. The Stage 3 Boss seems to have lost its music, and I think Void Break Lunatic might be broken.

[Pteriforever]

Okay~ I played some more. Most of the easier attacks are now more of a fair challenge, Good job ^.^ Second Story is really crazy... I haven't been able to get more than halfway through the boss yet, but it definitely feels like the next challenge after Hopeless, and it's quite fun ^.^ Anyway, here are some bugs and oddities I've found:

-- You can play attacks in Attack Practice even if you haven't seen them yet.
-- Trying to go into the Configuration menu crashes the game.
-- Selecting the bottommost option in any given screen of the Attack Practice menu causes the text at the bottom of the screen to turn yellow.
-- Some of Chaos Drive doesn't display question marks when unknown, and selecting the 10th or later will crash the game.
-- Scrolling to the 7th or later entry in the Attack Practice menu and then hitting X will return you to the ship select screen, with no ship at all selected. Playing like this simply gives you the (n-6)th ship, where n is the entry you selected. Selecting the 12th or later ship and doing this will simply crash the game. Going to the blank page to the left of Stage 1, then pressing the up key, then hitting X will leave you with a ship labelled "0" selected; attempting to play using this will crash the game.
-- 92. Void Break Lunatic only glitches out when played in an actual run; it works fine in Attack Practice.
-- 176. -Melancholy- Fragments of Retribution is a little too easy now.
-- 180. The Robotic Centurion's Incandescent Blaze REALLY didn't need to be buffed.
-- 228. -Negatio- First Trial "Denial" Lunatic is now terrifyingly insanely difficult
-- 244. -Dolorem- Fourth Trial "Misery" Lunatic is still too easy in my opinion, even with the changes. Maybe making the yellow knives fire in a full circle rather than just an arc would be good?
-- 288. Rumble Quasar makes me rather nauseous...

Other than that, everything's great

[Taizen Chisou]

Oh damn. I forgot to mention also that the game is going to start looking for a 07.ogg instead of a 07b.ogg, in regards to the 3rd boss theme.

Other points:

-- You can play attacks in Attack Practice even if you haven't seen them yet.

Completely intentional! For now, anyway. I wanted to be able to practice attacks that I was in the middle of editing, without having to malign the stage direction every time, hehe.

-- Trying to go into the Configuration menu crashes the game.

Oh right! In the score.ini, there's a heading called [setting].

Mine looks like this:

Code: Select all

[setting]
bg=1
bgm=1
full=1
sfx=1
surfaces=0
turbo=0

Copy that over and you should be fine.

-- Selecting the bottommost option in any given screen of the Attack Practice menu causes the text at the bottom of the screen to turn yellow.

Rofl. This is me being too lazy to re-state the defined color. I'll fix that.

-- Some of Chaos Drive doesn't display question marks when unknown, and selecting the 10th or later will crash the game.

I also completely forgot to mention that there are only 9 of them -.-;
Idiot Box, Placeholder Thing, Purple Head, Nategasa, Kewbs, Gear Axis, Solar Hydra, 6D-4, Hydra Fleet...
Yeah, that's as far as I've gotten so far.

-- Scrolling to the 7th or later entry in the Attack Practice menu and then hitting X will return you to the ship select screen, with no ship at all selected. Playing like this simply gives you the (n-6)th ship, where n is the entry you selected. Selecting the 12th or later ship and doing this will simply crash the game. Going to the blank page to the left of Stage 1, then pressing the up key, then hitting X will leave you with a ship labelled "0" selected; attempting to play using this will crash the game.

Okay now this is just weird. I haven't experienced an awful lot of the Chaos Drive page being locked, so I admit to not testing it very much. I suspect this is because I didn't do a very good job of making the menu remember what selection you were on previously, because in old builds of the game hitting "back" reset the cursor position to 1, haha. I'll hit it with a few hammers.

-- 92. Void Break Lunatic only glitches out when played in an actual run; it works fine in Attack Practice.

Oh what.

-- 176. -Melancholy- Fragments of Retribution is a little too easy now.

I was afraid of this. I just can't find a very good balance on this attack.

-- 180. The Robotic Centurion's Incandescent Blaze REALLY didn't need to be buffed.

Speaking of balance...

-- 228. -Negatio- First Trial "Denial" Lunatic is now terrifyingly insanely difficult

Yeah, I think my changes to how curving lasers worked leaked over into the main game somehow.

-- 244. -Dolorem- Fourth Trial "Misery" Lunatic is still too easy in my opinion, even with the changes. Maybe making the yellow knives fire in a full circle rather than just an arc would be good?

Haha. Are you staying in the middle, or running circles around the screen? I've left the latter in there as a viable option for the player to cheese the attack, mainly so there's one "breather" in the final boss right before you get to the survival and the final attack.

-- 288. Rumble Quasar makes me rather nauseous...

Which is half the point, but if you think it's really bad, I can probably tone it down a bit. Or maybe make the screen move in a sine-wave-y fashion.


Thanks for playing, heh.
Here's a video of me failing horribly at the Second Story. The mode gives you seven* lives to clear it, and I ended up using them all, of course. But considering I'm the one who made the game, and dozens of attempts into it, can only clear with the bare minimum of available resources, this probably means that the stage is Quite Tough.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmJ8ri1B ... e=youtu.be
(Is processing as of the time of this posting, give it a little bit)

*Possibly eight, if you perfect enough attacks

[Pteriforever]

Yeah, I've been going in circles around the edge in that attack, so that would explain it :3

Thanks~!

[Pteriforever]

Oh, and one more thing? The game seems to run at 58 fps for some bizarre reason o_o

[Taizen Chisou]

Oh right. The AGS is bugged, I changed a little bit of maths in it because the high-resolution framekeeping was contributing to lag. But I put together the variables wrong and now the game is calculating the resultant FPS a little asswards. So really the game is going to say 56 FPS instead of 50. Now, your 58 means that the game is probably running at 51.5 or so, which, I don't know what's causing that.
So! It's still running at 50, it's just being calculated wrong. I'm sorry!

[Pteriforever]

Okay, thanks for clearing that up ^.^

[Taizen Chisou]

I'm told that the download link broke some time ago. I'm sorry, I forgot to fix it after I moved some files around.

Here's a package that contains everything needed to run the game, you know, in case you were missing out on it from the first time.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/482 ... v0.81a.zip

[Pteriforever]

Thanks