Trigonometry Wars 3 Redux: The Revengeoning (v1.0 released!)

[Cagar]

Some japanese livestreamers refused to download or play your game because it has (illegally) saidaioujou and exceed3rd soundtrack files, and started mocking overseas for being baka gaijins and giving away namiki's work for free. And they were serious.

[Udderdude]

I think it's important to note here that the external program I wrote for my Flash games doesn't have the desktop squish problem.

Some japanese livestreamers refused to download or play your game because it has (illegally) saidaioujou and exceed3rd soundtrack files, and started mocking overseas for being baka gaijins and giving away namiki's work for free. And they were serious.

Can't blame them, hearing Cave music while playing this thing made me want to cringe.

[BPzeBanshee]

I think it's important to note here that the external program I wrote for my Flash games doesn't have the desktop squish problem.

Interesting! Does it work only for your Flash games or can it be applied to any other app as well? Also, do I have to pay for it seeing as it's included in Zero Cross?

RE Music, lol picky. I thought Giest had planned to replace the music with stuff from Newgrounds a while ago though.

[Udderdude]

I think it's important to note here that the external program I wrote for my Flash games doesn't have the desktop squish problem.

Interesting! Does it work only for your Flash games or can it be applied to any other app as well? Also, do I have to pay for it seeing as it's included in Zero Cross?

It does certian things to make sure the Flash game is actually running and that it can set the Flash window priority, etc.

It would require some modification to work with GameMaker, I think. Also, can GameMaker launch external .exe files?

[Giest118]

I appreciate all your suggestions to make this game better. I really do.

But I have no intention of further developing this game.

If there's one thing I've learned conclusively from the experience of releasing this game, it's that making games for other people is really unsatisfying to me. This is something I do to have fun in my own time, and I do enjoy it when I'm putting the interface together, making the stages and designing the bullet patterns. But now that the game is out and people are suggesting changes to bullet patterns/screen resolution/music/all the sprites/difficulty, it feels more like I'm being called upon to do work.

I once turned down a job offer to make NeoGeo shmups specifically because I don't want this to be something I do as work.

Yeah, this is my fault and I'm kind of doing a 180 here. I did ask for feedback regarding everything in the game. This is because I misunderstood what I wanted out of releasing this game. All I really wanted was to make a game for the fun of it and then let other people play it if they wanted to.

So, I thank you all for the feedback. But you can stop it now. :V

Critical bug reports are still welcome.

[n0rtygames]

If there's one thing I've learned conclusively from the experience of releasing this game, it's that making games for other people is really unsatisfying to me. This is something I do to have fun in my own time, and I do enjoy it when I'm putting the interface together, making the stages and designing the bullet patterns. But now that the game is out and people are suggesting changes to bullet patterns/screen resolution/music/all the sprites/difficulty, it feels more like I'm being called upon to do work.

People only make suggestions, because they care.

Sometimes, it might seem to an outsider that there's a pissing contest going on. But all developers want to make a game better than the last one or their closest competitor - that's entirely healthy.

What you're basically being told is "There's so much potential in your work - you could possibly make a very reputable doujin shmup if... x,y,z".

Unfortunately, you did kinda set yourself up for this with posts like "Here's how you do it properly, you fucknuts" (Boss thread) and so on. It paints a picture (whether this is accurate or not) that you want to be actively involved in the process of creating ground breaking shooters and helping people along with their own development. So I'll state again - any criticism or suggestions you're receiving are not because people are telling you what to do or engaging in a pissing contest-- it's because you're a very active participant in the dev forum and people are simply 'giving back'.

You make helpful points to others - such as dismantling the issues with my scoring system and letting me know why you felt they sucked from your perspective. It would be entirely acceptable for me to turn around and go "Well, sorry - this isn't the game I want to write" but I find the feedback to be genuinely quite insightful and helpful for refining future releases.

Making games for other people is unsatisfying. You're quite right. When you spend literally /years/ making something, trying to inject some of your own ideas in to them and the feedback goes from "omg amazing" to "wtf is this shit?" -- it can be a real bruise to the ego. Unfortunately, making games for other people usually leads to greater success. Casual players make up the majority of your player base after all and only a small percentage of them will even begin to appreciate some of the subtleties in your game. Sad, but true I'm afraid!

You've done a good job fixing the major bugs, it's given you things to think about if you make more games. You should at least be commended for that. It's very easy to go "Oh fuck you guys!" and then bury your head in the sand.

[railslave]

This is something I do to have fun in my own time, and I do enjoy it when I'm putting the interface together, making the stages and designing the bullet patterns.

The quaility of the shooting action/patterns ect.. is so well done and researched such that any points docked for anything else are soon made up imo. I find your game highly educational as well, as somebody learning the ropes.
well done!!

[Cagar]

Just saying: I've been messing around with the game using GM, I've already done lot of changes (with the help of giest) and you might see TW3R: Cagar Label in the future.

[n0rtygames]

Just saying: I've been messing around with the game using GM, I've already done lot of changes (with the help of giest) and you might see TW3R: Cagar Label in the future.

Sweet! We managed to suck you in to development! ^.^

[DrInfy]

People only make suggestions, because they care.

Sometimes, it might seem to an outsider that there's a pissing contest going on. But all developers want to make a game better than the last one or their closest competitor - that's entirely healthy.

One thing I've noticed is that when people actually bother making suggestions is that they're at least interested in what you're doing. When no one is complaining, they either never tried your game because it didn't seem interesting enough or they've seen your game as too hopeless to even give any feedback. So in fact when someone complains, it is probably the second highest compliment you're going to get. The only one higher is that they claim your game is perfect. It's up to the developer as to how use the feedback is used and obviously not all feedback is even correct or useful, but I find it rather silly that someone refuses to get feedback from the work they made. Feedback can also be used as driving force to make the next thing/product/whatever/version even better. I've spent a ton of time making my own media player that I still use daily, and I really tried to make it useful for other people too. In the end however I couldn't get my friends of family to use it while givíng feedback. While I still use it daily, it's missing a ton of features that I - myself would find useful, because I had no one complaining about the lack of these things. I'm too lazy to fix up things if I don't really have to.

Even if you didn't want them, I'm still giving you a compliment: I think I would have preferred an abstract style of some sort for enemy ships to match the game name and using stolen songs from famous shmups doesn't really help anything. Other than that I found the game to be decently fun to play.

[n0rtygames]

So in short Giest, your game is full of stolen sound, rubbish graphics and you should be ashamed of yourself for making a thread telling people how to make games when you don't want to fix up your own game!

*rage*

Make DoPonyPachi 2 please.

[Giest118]

I guess it was just a bit annoying to me that I only got some of this feedback AFTER the game was actually finished and released? I did kind of release a beta and a v0.8 version specifically so I could get more feedback to make the game better before actually "finishing" it.

But you know what they say.
"Fuck it."

Once again, I do appreciate the feedback. I'll take it into account for any future games I might make. :V

[n0rtygames]

I remember BareKnuckleRoo once said to me that there's very few people who actually want to play betas in any real anger. Most people are interested in the final product... I was sending out a few private builds.

I got the same sort of thing. "Hey, nice game bro" and that's pretty much it until release... when you start to get the REAL feedback..

[Udderdude]

It's true, hard to find serious testers and most of the people testing your game will be other devs who have spare time.

[mystran]

I remember BareKnuckleRoo once said to me that there's very few people who actually want to play betas in any real anger. Most people are interested in the final product... I was sending out a few private builds.

I got the same sort of thing. "Hey, nice game bro" and that's pretty much it until release... when you start to get the REAL feedback..

I guess that's why people rave about "release early, release often" and some even offer the "buy in alpha/beta for reduced price" model (where in theory everyone wins twice(!) since dev gets cash-flow but also feedback, and customers get better product cheaper).

Anyway, don't know how applicable this is for games (since they are somewhat "consumable" products), but for "other fields of software" I've personally come to accept a model where I often just pick one of the "reasonably finished beta" versions and call it the "release version" (or 1.0). I do have some "trusted" people (known to send useful feedback regularly) that I spam with various development versions, but in general almost everything "public" is a "release." Sometimes I might do that even with some features missing (as long as nobody can notice, hehe) and usually with the expectation that I'm probably going to do another version (or several) shortly after. Besides, most people always seem quite happy when you update something "released" where as "beta" versions often attract more unreasonable feature request or simply "can't you release it already" type feedback.

I actually used to call stuff "beta" first, but generally found out that simply calling it a release, you get better feedback and otherwise it doesn't really matter that much (at least on PC the overhead of releasing a few updates is pretty low). Now I label things "beta" only if I actually expect random crashes or other show-stopper bugs (say I've been unable to test on some "known to be problematic" configuration, and I suspect it might not work) and specifically want the "seems to work" type answers... or if something is obviously a prototype that needs more work to be usable.

[Cagar]

Download v1.5 FINAL VER.
(put it in the same folder with the original TW3R and launch)


After talking with giest on steam, he sent me the whole project so I could watch how he does stuff, and what's his basic structure of the whole game. It was pretty much for me to learn stuff, as I want to make my own shmup (which I still have on mind).
I did some changes just to test stuff and to see if it works, but I.. kind of.. got addicted.. to doing things.. to giest's game.
I forgot sleeping that night, and decided to start making Cagar-label of the game.

I've been working on this non-stop for a week now, I've used EVERY second of my free time to this for perfect stage-balance.

I need to talk with giest about releasing this thing, because I really want to get everyone playing.

Most of the chages are beneath enemy replacements and pattern changes, which I'm not going to write one-by-one, because there are LOTS of them.

But yeah, here's what I've done so far:

v.1.5 final Changelist:
-HP changes
-Enemy placement
-Pattern changes
-Some adjustments (what the fuck?)

v.1.4 Changelist

-Fixed laser tearing (thanks giest)
-Added 2nd loop score-getpoints multiplier of 1.5x (thanks giest)
-Made getpoints HITS multiplier visible (thanks giest)
-Few enemy replacements

v.1.35 Changelist

-Actually fixed HP-bars
-Small boss 5 nerf

v 1.32 Changelist:

-Fixed boss phase-separator in HP-bar

v 1.31 Changelist:

-Fixed TLB

v 1.3 Changelist:

-Fixed 2nd loop extends
-Fixed Boss HP stuff

v 1.2 Changelist:

-Type A options wider
-Type A Hyper shots more beautiful
-Laser damage-aura made bigger
-Hyper invicible-time doubled
-Air score-items give more GetPoints (10 -> 15)
-Combo-gauge made bigger
-GetPoints color changes
-Few enemy replacements
-Boss HPs nerfed (especially stage 5 and 4)
-2nd loop bosses nerfed
-Score for beating bosses increased a lot
-You get an extend after every stage in 2nd loop

V 1.01 Changelist:

-Ship speed adjustments

Changelist (Differences between the original game):


GRAPHICS:

-Enemy bullet colors changed
-Glow added to enemy bullets
-Enemy bullet shapes changed

-Type A shot & laser color changed
-Re-worked all lasers and shots to be bigger and better
-Re-worked impact effects & laser-aura
-Re-worked hyper graphics

-Added small glow to player-ship
-Hitbox re-worked (bigger and flashier, always visible)

-Stage 1 boss background changed
-Stage 2 clouds are bigger
-Stage 2 background color added to beginning

-Big ships tuned a little
-Butterflies turned to ships

-Score-items changed to glowing stars (Changes size according to getpoints and hypering)

-Cool explosion-flash-effect added

-How-to-play screen completely re-worked

MECHANICS:

-Type B and C movement speed made faster
-Option placements for all ships changed a little
-but the most important one: Type A = wider
-Player shot speed increased a lot

-Hypers recharge while hypering, but only 60% of the real speed

-Enemy patterns & firing speed adjusted and fine-tuned A LOT.
-2nd loop basic popcorns shoot 3-way stuff, but slower firing speed
-Yellow ships don't shoot suicide-bullets if too close to player
-Big ship patterns almost completely re-worked
-New common rule to big ships: They shoot some kind of very slow stuff depending on the ship, but keep them on screen as long as possible before destroying them for huge score
-No stupid safespot-patterns anymore

-Lots of enemy replacements for more balanced difficulty:
Stage 1 = Easier
Stage 5 = More opportunities for scoring-routes

-Stage 4, 2-4 midbosses and stage 5 boss nerfed (Lower HP, some pattern-changes)

-2nd loop requirements completely removed

-You get 1 bomb after each stage instead of full refill

SCORING:


-GetPoints limit removed.

-Added chain-multiplier according to getpoints:
30k = 2x hits
60k = 3x hits
90k = 4x hits
Basically, using lvl 10 hyper while your getpoints are over 90k, you'll get 44 hits for each enemy

-Hypers don't recharge with increased speed with chain anymore

-Chaining made a little easier: Gauge is slower

-Dropping your chain changed:
You lose 30% of hits and 50% of GetPoints
-Bombing changed: same penalty as chain drop
You still lose everything upon death

For lulz, here's a screenshot of beginning stage 5. (Notice airmarines)

[emphatic]

You go, Cagar!

[Cagar]

-Deleted

[Giest118]

Doesn't appear to matter what version of this game I play, once stage 5 hits, I start to suck ass. Would've gotten much further in if I'd gotten to the second loop with any kind of decent resources. :V

[Meseki]

Stage 1 is certainly a bit more reasonable on Cagar Label, though I'm not sure if it was because of an increased amount of bullet-cancelling enemies or because of the changes to bombing and Hypers. I did make it to Stage 3 boss on this version, where I normally only get to around late Stage 2 (boss?) on the original.

However, it probably shouldn't have the same scoreboard as the original version (save it in a different file, maybe?); I'd never be able to keep track of any scores on the original version if I played more often. Just today, I got ~49 million on Cagar Label (on my third credit), and then ~12 million on the original.

[Giest118]

Stage 1 is certainly a bit more reasonable on Cagar Label, though I'm not sure if it was because of an increased amount of bullet-cancelling enemies or because of the changes to bombing and Hypers. I did make it to Stage 3 boss on this version, where I normally only get to around late Stage 2 (boss?) on the original.

However, it probably shouldn't have the same scoreboard as the original version (save it in a different file, maybe?); I'd never be able to keep track of any scores on the original version if I played more often. Just today, I got ~49 million on Cagar Label (on my third credit), and then ~12 million on the original.

Will bring that up with Cagar when next I see him. I know exactly what bit of code would need to be changed for that.

[Cagar]

Few graphical changes and literally few popcorn placements. v1.0 is here, scores still apply.

[Cagar]

v1.01
Ship speeds adjusted very little

[nasty_wolverine]

@cagar
when you move up and down, you can see artifacts in the lasers.
you can fix this, by fixing the laser sprites positions in relation to the ship vertical and horizontal (horizontal seems to be fixed)

On general I felt that cagarlabel was a bit tougher than vanilla TW3R...

[BPzeBanshee]

@cagar
when you move up and down, you can see artifacts in the lasers.
you can fix this, by fixing the laser sprites positions in relation to the ship vertical and horizontal (horizontal seems to be fixed)

You just noticed? It was in the original version too.

I actually thought Cagar's take was easier. I could get to Stage 4 whereas I generally die on 2 in Giest's version. Bit much purple/glow, although the graphics do generally help it look a bit better I think.

Cagar, how about some music replacement? You were the one who brought it up in the first place, now's your chance to do something about it.

[Cagar]

I've been looking for free music in 3 hour sessions a couple of times, but can't find anything good. It's much harder than you'd expect

[nasty_wolverine]

I've been looking for free music in 3 hour sessions a couple of times, but can't find anything good. It's much harder than you'd expect

I am sure musicians on this forum can whip up something... turn it into community label of some sorts...

[emphatic]

I've been looking for free music in 3 hour sessions a couple of times, but can't find anything good. It's much harder than you'd expect

How long are the stages, 2 minutes or shorter?
How long (on average) are the boss fights?
What type of electronic music do you hate and just can't stand so volunteers won't waste their precious time?

[Cagar]

Stage 1 is just under 2 minutes, everything else is longer.
Boss fights.. i'd say 2 minutes.
Stage 1 needs to be happy, sdoj-like.
I might give more detailed info soon

And I don't want forum members to do any songs for me

[Giest118]

If it helps, there's really only five "problem songs." They are:

> Stage1
> Stage4
> Boss
> TrueLastBoss2A
> TrueLastBoss2B

The rest is all public domain.