It is a dodge sim in which you have to avoid being hit by raindrops, otherwise the cute sugar cube will melt. The stages are created by text files. The drops will fall more
or less in a formation resembling the letters and gusts of wind appear every few seconds according to the current character.
Besides this there is a scoring system including grazing, collecting point items and changing the side.
The game is OpenSource, has a story mode with five stages, a creation mode to play your own texts and a replay function.
1) You can see the hitbox of the character by pressing the left shift key (red dot). The hitbox of the drop is the center, where it is a bit brighter.
2) Yes, I realized that to, so I removed the dark drops already from stage 3 and 5. If they still blend too much I will see if I remove them or change their color.
3) My thought was that shmup players are used to hold the Z key all the time and I didn't want to warp them from their habit
It seems there's a complete lack of blowing stuff up. And the music is like .. almost depressing. The whole theme of "Dodge rain while listening to morose music" is just wierd. I can't really play this without wanting to fall asleep.
I could also sit in the lower left corner and almost nothing would come near me, at least on the first 2 levels. This was on the hardest difficulty, too.
And I couldn't get joystick support to work.
Also agree with everything moozoh said. I could tell just from the screenshots that the #1 complaint would be "The backgrounds are too bright/high contrast".
Udderdude wrote:It seems there's a complete lack of blowing stuff up.
That's why it is called "dodge sim"
Udderdude wrote:And the music is like .. almost depressing. The whole theme of "Dodge rain while listening to morose music" is just wierd.
Thanks, that's exactly what I wanted.
Udderdude wrote:I could also sit in the lower left corner and almost nothing would come near me, at least on the first 2 levels. This was on the hardest difficulty, too.
Surviving isn't difficult, but if you want to get some points you have to move. That's also the reason why I included the "sidechange". Move from one side to the other to increase the number added to the multiplier.
Udderdude wrote:And I couldn't get joystick support to work.
I don't have joystick so I couldn't implement and test that.
Pit wrote:1) You can see the hitbox of the character by pressing the left shift key (red dot). The hitbox of the drop is the center, where it is a bit brighter.
Thanks, that helped a lot.
Pit wrote:2) Yes, I realized that to, so I removed the dark drops already from stage 3 and 5. If they still blend too much I will see if I remove them or change their color.
They do. :\ I was going for a no-miss/no-bomb stage 2 but died 4 times when the darkest bullets blended entirely with the dark parts of the background, so I just couldn't see them.
[EDIT]
Two more questions:
1) How to know if you've "changed side" to increase multiplier?
2) How big is the grazing area? MAybe it should be marked in some way when you hold shift or something?
Matskat wrote:This neighborhood USED to be nice...until that family of emulators moved in across the street....
For the dark-drop-haters: version1.0.1 40 KB Windows
When you have changed the side the "Mu Add" is increased and there will be an animation and a sound. Hard to describe, better you look at:
data/graphics/sidechangeanim.png
data/sounds/sidechange.ogg
You have a graze if the distance between your center and the center of the drop is less than 20 pixels. There is an animation and sound if you get it.
Udderdude wrote:I could also sit in the lower left corner and almost nothing would come near me, at least on the first 2 levels. This was on the hardest difficulty, too.
Surviving isn't difficult, but if you want to get some points you have to move.
IMO a good game is fun when you play for score or survival. If it's boring for either one, you've alienated half your players allready.
Udderdude wrote:IMO a good game is fun when you play for score or survival. If it's boring for either one, you've alienated half your players allready.
I realized already at the very beginning of the development, that the thing with the winds has the disadvantage, that there are parts of the screen without any bullets. But nevertheless I continued with this idea simply because I wanted to implement it, even if I had to abandon things for it. Of course I could have used the classic patterns which don't have this problem but that wasn't what I wanted. Probably I'd got a few downloads more but I wouldn't be satisfied with the game.
Besides I think that beating the later stages on difficult is still challenging enough to play for survival.
Dale wrote:I really enjoy it, but it would make me enjoy it more if I could use a joystick.
Thanks, but like I said already I didn't have the possibilty to implement the joystick. Well, to be perfectly honest I even have to say that I never thought about that because I'm not used to be mindful of joysticks.
Dale wrote:I really enjoy it, but it would make me enjoy it more if I could use a joystick.
Token Xpadder post (thank Ghegs). It's annoying that so many ppl don't know about those tools. Every time someone posts a game that doesn't work with joypad, there's ppl unknowingly unnecessarily asking for that feature.
I liked the game quite a bit. I really like the style and the uniqueness.
My few criticisms are I don't like dropping to the bottom of the screen whenever I die. I get the concept and everything that you get washed down with the rain, but I find it annoying. If it's something that you're in love with, I wouldn't hold it against you. It was just hard for the first few games to figure out where I was when I died, maybe raise the level of the water on the bottom and stick the character out a bit higher so it's more visible?
The wind effect, I like it but sometimes the up drafts seemed to extreme to me. It caused me to get into situations that were virtually impossible to get out of.
My only other comment is a suggestion which is animated characters would make the game a lot more interesting.
But I really do like it. Those are just my thoughts.
Hulkcore wrote:It was just hard for the first few games to figure out where I was when I died.
Oh, didn't realize that this could be a problem. I always moved directly up after being hit to get 6 grazes in the 2 seconds in which you are invincible, because then you won't lose a life.
Hulkcore wrote:It caused me to get into situations that were virtually impossible to get out of.
Yes, sometimes they are a bit extreme. But because of the possibilty to avoid losing a life (see above) or to press X and start the rain rush I thought that I could leave it at that.
And again thanks for all the comments, I get really good feedback in this forum.
