Bounty Runner-Work in Progress

[Dragon Walker]

"Bounty Runner, a title given to the best of bounty hunters, prepared to chase criminals to the end of the world to collect the bounty.
Playing as either the hunter Ark or Fridan, your job is to charge head-first against hordes of enemies, blasting your way through, dodging barrages of attacks in this challenging game."

Hi. This is a game I've been making during my free time, and it's also my first game that I've shown to public. I've been doing all the programming and graphics from scratch myself, and the music (That is, the only song so far.) has been composed by a friend of mine, commonly known as Demigod. (http://www.youtube.com/user/DemigodDoesNintendo) The sound has been taken from flashkit.com and most of the sound clips have been edited by me.

I have had problems getting feedback, since most of my friends are pretty bad at shmups, so I decided to try my luck here. It would be of tremendous help to me if you could give me real feedback, since all I've got so far is some friends praises for actually being capable of making a game and the occasional random-1-star-rating-good-for-nothing-dude. I need the opinions from the pros.

This beta contains the first stage of the game, along with one of the two playable characters. The complete version will hopefully contain a total of 8 stages, along with a deeper story, both playable characters, and a crazy cast of characters. I wouldn't be surprised if this took another year or so to complete, with school and all in the way. If you got any other questions, I will gladly try to answer them.

*Edit: I've heard from a few that when playing via Instant Play, the music won't play, while when downloading, it works perfectly fine. I have honestly no idea why this happens, but I'll try my best to solve it.*

Game
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http://www.yoyogames.com/games/show/103878

Images
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If someone is capable of recording some in-game play and let me upload it on my Youtube to advertise, I would be very grateful. My laptop is a bit weak. Credits will be given.

[zebdal]

the character is really slow, you really should increase a lot the speed of the player.
the animation when the player is hit is really long.
I don't like fullscreen

[Dragon Walker]

the character is really slow, you really should increase a lot the speed of the player.
the animation when the player is hit is really long.
I don't like fullscreen

*You're the first to even mention the character's speed. If more complains, I might do something about it. Worth to mention is that the currently character is the slower one of the two that will be in the final product. Also, it might be bad if the character moves too fast, since that might cause an accidental suicide kill in bullet hells.

*The full death animation is a bit long, now when you say that. Kinda obvious since he doesn't explode, which would look pretty silly if you ask me. However, it should be really easy to shorten it a bit, either by increasing the flying-off-the-screen speed or by shortening the off-screen time.

*Did you check the option menu? You can change it there. Or did you read the controls? It said "Press F4 anytime to change full-screen mode", I believe.

[zebdal]

I've done a test:

by the left to the right:

your game:
It took me 9 seconds

touhou 9 with the slowest character:
1 second and a half

touhou 7 with reimu:
1 second and a half

mars matrix:
i think 2 seconds

my own shmup:
2 seconds

[Dragon Walker]

I've done a test:

by the left to the right:

your game:
It took me 9 seconds

touhou 9 with the slowest character:
1 second and a half

touhou 7 with reimu:
1 second and a half

mars matrix:
i think 2 seconds

my own shmup:
2 seconds

Hold on. 9 seconds? How did you manage that? I did a practical test, and a bit of math. The practical test didn't get close to your time.

The character moves at a speed of 3 pixels per frames. From right to left it is 540 pixels. The set fps is 60/sec. That means 180 pixels per sec. That's exactly 3 seconds to cross the screen. That's a third of what you got. I really wonder if the game is running at full speed for you.

[zebdal]

60 fps is too much for a game done with gm.
if your game lags, maybe it's because of that.

I only use 30 fps for my shoot and the result is not bad.

[worstplayer]

60 fps is too much for a game done with gm.
if your game lags, maybe it's because of that.

I only use 30 fps for my shoot and the result is not bad.

GM can handle surprising amount of stuff. If your game lags, it's not because of 60fps, but because you're doing it wrong. Simplify the effects, write your own collision detection routines, don't spawn any unneeded instances, never ever use execute_string(), etc etc.

EDIT: To me the player's speed seems fine. It's about as fast as Raiden2 ship. It just looks slower because it's widescreen. What I *didn't* like are the bosses. They just take too long to kill and their attacks are too repetitive.

[Dragon Walker]

To me the player's speed seems fine. It's about as fast as Raiden2 ship. It just looks slower because it's widescreen. What I *didn't* like are the bosses. They just take too long to kill and their attacks are too repetitive.

Well, if they are repetative, I probably should do something, but then I need to know a few things.

Are they repetative on all levels? Rookie has very simple attack patterns, while Legend has more complex.

Are you using Focus Fire (Shift button)? I can finish some phases before the attack patterns even get a chance to loop with heavy abuse of focus fire.

Are there any specific patterns you have in mind? It would make editing easier for me if I knew where to start.

[monkeyman]

I've tried 60fps on a few GM games and it seems to work fine for me, though my old computer would struggle occasionally.
Like previous people have said, if you keep the memory usage down it should work fine on most PCs.