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

[Giest118]

Where the shitting hell is hyper rank? If you get that many hypers you better have some reason not to use them continuously.

If there is hyper rank it's not scary enough.

The way I did hypers makes it so they're not all that useful unless you stack up a bunch of them. Stacking up a bunch of them means not pressing the bomb button for a long time (risk). Using a bunch of them makes your firepower and score go absolutely fucknuts (reward). In order to get the most out of a given hyper discharge, you need to refrain from pressing the bomb button (risk). Furthermore, while a hyper is going on, you cannot charge the next one at all. Since higher-level hypers last longer, this can mean quite a while before the next time you get even a first-level hyper (risk).

Apparently this isn't enough though. I'm on record as having a general dislike of rank systems, so if you have some other suggestion, I'm all ears. Alternatively, if I get, like, a bunch more people to tell me that a rank system is the only way to make the game good, I'll go with that. :V

[Giest118]

Eh, fuck it, I know exactly how I can add a "hyper rank" system.

I dunno if anyone noticed this, but wherever enemies used in stage 1 were re-used in stage 2, they're slightly more aggressive. I do this by changing a single number in the code between stages, a number that controls firing rates and stuff.

So, what I can do is make it so that when you use a hyper, this number is increased and enemies are suddenly as hard as they would be if you were playing the next stage. The number returns to normal when the hyper ends.

[BPzeBanshee]

Regarding gameplay:
I liked it. Seemed fine to me. Then again I'm not particularly fussy, although the HUD being entirely in bright grey on the side of the screen is a little uneasy for me to adjust to.

Regarding music:
I notice after the second in-track loop the music just starts from the beginning. SuperSound isn't the most friendly sound system in the world to use but I managed to come up with a system for using it with looping based on loop points rather than just the start and end of a file. Pretty sure I linked to it on the GMOSSE thread but I can send it to you if you're interested in shaving off some filesize and getting at least Stage 1's music to loop correctly.

EDIT: I plugged out my gamepad and holy shit this slowdown... It seems that having a controller plugged in prevents it

That sounds like some kind of IRQ/driver issue rather than anything Geist is doing. I'm interested to hear what other games you get this issue with.

[Giest118]

@Cagar:
I think I know why the chaining seems so harsh. The "gold point item" mechanic was added before I added the hypers, so previously, the hit count always stayed at a more reasonable level. Now, though, it can go up to the thousands, which can cause gold point items to be worth 50,000 apiece by the end of stage 2. So, yeah, the scoring balance is kind of fucked there at the moment. I can mitigate this in a couple of ways:
1) Reduce the effect that hit count has on the value of gold point items
2) Not have hit count matter at all for gold point items, and just make gold point items worth five times as much or something

Regarding music:
I notice after the second in-track loop the music just starts from the beginning. SuperSound isn't the most friendly sound system in the world to use but I managed to come up with a system for using it with looping based on loop points rather than just the start and end of a file. Pretty sure I linked to it on the GMOSSE thread but I can send it to you if you're interested in shaving off some filesize and getting at least Stage 1's music to loop correctly.

I sort of doubt I'll use it, but if you send it to me I may remember it in the future.

[n0rtygames]

@Cagar:I think I know why the chaining seems so harsh.

My 2 cents on this would be that there's nothing wrong with a harsh scoring system, as this makes the difference between 8 million and 28 million a true reflection of the players dedication to the game and skill.

My experience has been that if you make your score system too easy, anyone can start getting scores in the billions after the smallest amount of practise. You can't say the same of DDP or DOJ where a reasonable amount of precision and sometimes frustrating memorisation is required to get the higher scores the game has to offer. DOJBL came later to address making the game easier as a whole - as quite frankly its original incarnation was dick-in-face hard. For me at least..

I'll be honest and make a comparison between our games and say that Chronoblast suffers (imo) quite badly from having scores that are too accessible for people who play like retards (i.e me).. It depends on whether you want your game to be played by the hardcore for score, over a long period -- or if you expect people to just pick up your game, play for a few days and then put it down when something better comes along.

In my case, I've resigned myself to the latter - I'm not the most skilled shmupper out there, but I'm competent enough. With your collection of youtube videos - I think people will have a little more faith in your ability to fully understand how to balance a shmup and when difficult is *too* difficult... so I would wager that your system probably isn't TOO hard.. it's just old school..

[Giest118]

Yeah, the thing is that my system had this thing where point items would give you 50,000 points apiece while enemies would give you only 20,000. Which is pretty silly for a system trying to emulate DDP. :V

So I'm brainstorming ways of tweaking this, to include better risk/reward while also keeping the scoring balanced. RNGmaster may have been onto something when he mentioned a rank system. Although I'm usually not a fan of those, I have loved games that used them. I basically just need to come up with a way to use one well. :V

[Cagar]

I watched my friend play your game for an hour today, he's completely noob and doesn't play much shmups, but he really appreciates the genre, and is somewhat interested in serious shmuppin'.
So what happened?
He started like "meh", but in a few minutes, he was filled with adrenaline, addiction, RAGE, and a VERY bad case of restart-syndrome. He even started to care about scoring, and eventually started failing because of trying to score too hard. He also said, that if you really didn't mimic the stage-design from something else, you have true talent. He didn't beat the 2 stages though, but he got pretty far at stage 2 boss a few times.
After he finally gave up, I showed him how2play with 50m score... he was fucked.
The only bad thing he/we could think of, was that these guys have too much HP, and bullets are too colorful. In bosses rainbow-patterns are okay, but the disco-feel in stage 2 is pretty fucked up. You could even add sdoj-like glow around the bullets, or at least make them blue & red only. There's really no good reason NOT to do this.

About scoring: Just make chain-drops more forgiving, don't cap any shit please.


I don't want to sound bossy when suggesting so much stuff, but I have very much faith in this project, even if it's just your free-time hobby, I'm waiting for the full release like if it was a new cave-game or something. It's already easily my favorite .. doujin? indieshmup?

EDIT: Alright, i realised that the HP of those green guys is for chaining, so another solution to make them not-so-hard would be that they stop shooting after going past mid-screen. They can really fuck you up in their current state if you don't know where they appear (in advance)

[Giest118]

I have this idea for dealing with the chaining:

When your chain breaks, your Hit Count is cut by half and the chain gauge refills. If it empties again, cut Hit Count by half again, repeat the process. Also do something with the Get Point value every time too. Not sure exactly what yet. Hopefully this is lenient enough while still providing ample motivation to keep the chain from breaking.

Also, bombing or dying will still reset the chain completely. Hopefully this is entirely understandable.

The rainbow motherfuckery is kind of a tradition of the Trigonometry Wars series, so I won't revert to only using two bullet colors. I can reduce the number of colors I use at once though. Are you referring to the butterflies who shoot arcs of rainbow, or was this more of a problem in the second half of the stage?

[Cagar]

Are you referring to the butterflies who shoot arcs of rainbow, or was this more of a problem in the second half of the stage?

Both.
That's a good idea for chain-breaks.

[Meseki]

Does restarting disqualify a high score? I've had a few high scores not record and was thinking that may be the case. If so, I don't see much reason for it, since it sends you back to stage 1.

Also, a few things I've noted:
-Pausing is tied to the player object, so when you die, you can't pause (to restart) until you respawn
-There is nothing that shows how long until your Hyper ends
-Not really a problem (maybe intentional?), but the game goes at about half speed during the boss introduction and Stage Clear bonus

[Giest118]

Does restarting disqualify a high score? I've had a few high scores not record and was thinking that may be the case. If so, I don't see much reason for it, since it sends you back to stage 1.

Also, a few things I've noted:
-Pausing is tied to the player object, so when you die, you can't pause (to restart) until you respawn
-There is nothing that shows how long until your Hyper ends
-Not really a problem (maybe intentional?), but the game goes at about half speed during the boss introduction and Stage Clear bonus

I thought I did make it record high scores when restarting. Although I don't know why you would restart if you were in the middle of a run whose score you wanted recorded anyway. :V I'll look at it later.

I don't know why the game slows down for you during boss introductions and clear bonuses, though I know what those have in common, and that is printed text. But there's printed text anyway (what with the score, get point value, hypers) so I don't know why it would suddenly be a problem there.

[Meseki]

I thought I did make it record high scores when restarting. Although I don't know why you would restart if you were in the middle of a run whose score you wanted recorded anyway. :V I'll look at it later.

I don't know why the game slows down for you during boss introductions and clear bonuses, though I know what those have in common, and that is printed text. But there's printed text anyway (what with the score, get point value, hypers) so I don't know why it would suddenly be a problem there.

The restarting is mostly because of deaths near the beginning of stage 1.

As for the slowdowns, that's probably my computer having issues with some later Game Maker games or something, as I think I had issues with Jumper Three and a few other Game Maker games. Thankfully, the issue here is tolerable, since nothing is really going on at those times.

[BPzeBanshee]

I don't know why the game slows down for you during boss introductions and clear bonuses, though I know what those have in common, and that is printed text. But there's printed text anyway (what with the score, get point value, hypers) so I don't know why it would suddenly be a problem there

You're not doing anything atypical like surface rendering for the printed text are you? Gustav's later projects do that, could be a handy test case for Meseki to replicate the slowdown.

Probably got something wonky for graphics/CPU that really doesn't like much Draw usage though, in my experience that's more likely it. The Atom laptops ("EwwPCs" or netbooks) tend to have that: even GMOSSE doesn't run fullspeed on them despite having a fair share of RAM and clock speed for CPU.

[Giest118]

I just draw the text with the Draw commands. Only excessive thing I can think of is that to get that white-text-with-colored-shadow effect I actually draw the text twice, but still, it's just text. I never thought it would cause slowdown for anyone.

I can fix it for the boss introductions by actually creating a sprite that has the flavor text on it, but the end-of-stage bonuses need to be generated dynamically, so it won't work there.

[BPzeBanshee]

I just draw the text with the Draw commands. Only excessive thing I can think of is that to get that white-text-with-colored-shadow effect I actually draw the text twice, but still, it's just text. I never thought it would cause slowdown for anyone.

I can fix it for the boss introductions by actually creating a sprite that has the flavor text on it, but the end-of-stage bonuses need to be generated dynamically, so it won't work there.

Actually, while doing work on Aero Flux I did notice that drawing text twice seems to be very abusive on some systems. I solved it by switching to a sprite-based font, making the font exactly the same as if I'd drawn it that way and then just added the outline onto the font sprite itself. In the long run that'd probably be easier: there's a program (made in GM) that I've mentioned in the past that (I think it was called Font Express?) allows you to do exactly that and export directly into pictures easily loadable via GM. I started doing it for GMOSSE starting from MK-VI and never looked back.

[Giest118]

Actually, while doing work on Aero Flux I did notice that drawing text twice seems to be very abusive on some systems. I solved it by switching to a sprite-based font, making the font exactly the same as if I'd drawn it that way and then just added the outline onto the font sprite itself. In the long run that'd probably be easier: there's a program (made in GM) that I've mentioned in the past that (I think it was called Font Express?) allows you to do exactly that and export directly into pictures easily loadable via GM. I started doing it for GMOSSE starting from MK-VI and never looked back.

Aha, that sounds badass. I'll get on that the next time I have a minute.

[Giest118]

Shit is still happening with this.

I have mixed feelings about my design so far in stage 3. I may have to completely change it in its entirety. Or make tweaks that'll force it to work. One of those things.

Note to self: Space levels lack ground-based enemies. This limits enemy selection and causes shit to suck. If I make another Trigonometry Wars game, it will not have any space levels. None. At all. AT ALL.

[nasty_wolverine]

Shit is still happening with this.

I have mixed feelings about my design so far in stage 3. I may have to completely change it in its entirety. Or make tweaks that'll force it to work. One of those things.

Note to self: Space levels lack ground-based enemies. This limits enemy selection and causes shit to suck. If I make another Trigonometry Wars game, it will not have any space levels. None. At all. AT ALL.

I use to think that too... I was thinking of various ways to have stationary enemies (which would translate to ground based enemies) in my level but since the background was just green on black grid, I couldnt think of any way to put in stationary enemies with out making it look out of place...

Then I played Flying V (Rozyrg)... It had Flying F***king Tanks. in the first level. of the stages i have played in flying v, even without ground enemies level design is amazing. when I saw those tanks flying into the screen... mindblown... and resulted in making the sig. one day I ll probably write a song about flying tanks...

[Lord Satori]

Shit is still happening with this.

I have mixed feelings about my design so far in stage 3. I may have to completely change it in its entirety. Or make tweaks that'll force it to work. One of those things.

Note to self: Space levels lack ground-based enemies. This limits enemy selection and causes shit to suck. If I make another Trigonometry Wars game, it will not have any space levels. None. At all. AT ALL.

oh whats that, a floating space platform/base complete with ground based enemies?

[Giest118]

oh whats that, a floating space platform/base complete with ground based enemies?

That solution works in the first half of the stage, but it starts to make less sense when you're in the middle of a dark-space vortex.

[Giest118]

So the stage portion of stage 3 is done; started making the boss today. I may adjust certain parts of the stage itself later, but I think I'm making good progress.

[Giest118]

So I was working on this. Then Christmas happened and I got sidetracked and was forced at gunpoint to install and get used to a new OS. YAAYY

But I'm back into "able to do shit" mode now, so a status update. I'm at the stage 4 midboss now. I've run out of bosses that I can reasonably demote to midbosses, so this one's gonna be entirely new.

Stage 4 is... a bit of a jump in difficulty. But that's basically par for the course in these games. :V

[n0rtygames]

Then Christmas happened and I got sidetracked

Say no more.

Your pain is felt

[Giest118]

WELL HOLY SHIT I GOT SIDETRACKED BY OTHER THINGS SUCH AS SCHOOL AND READING "THE SHORT VICTORIOUS WAR" WHAT THE FUCK WAS I DOING WITH THIS AGAIN

...

Oh right, stage 4 boss! I'd better get right on that.

[Giest118]

Aaand stage 4 boss is done.

I'm kinda crawling through this, I know. But hey, just got stage 5 to make now. :V

[Giest118]

Stage 5 is well on its way. It kinda kicks my ass, but that's to be expected.

Getting up to the boss soon. That one's gonna be a doozy to make.

[BPzeBanshee]

Well you're certainly churning the game out fast. Almost wish I could do the same with GMOSSE, but time, energy and my secret assist project is consuming me. Hope you get this out soon.

[Giest118]

To be fair, it seems like more work goes into GMOSSE's stages, and GMOSSE is a hell of a lot prettier in general. :V

[BPzeBanshee]

Well I suppose. I do like to make things nice to a point, although most of the background stuff is either rendered with Universe (all space/planets) or with GIMP (Stage 2), or others' work with permission (Swordfish, some sfx, music).

I find most of the time is spent on the core work myself It's nice to be able to brag about the 'GMOSSE Team' (I can't say it's just me, for instance Nimitz did the initial joystick support code, I added deadzones and rebinding later) being able to pull off things that folks like Alluro said was impossible to do in GM, but only having the two stages after two years does seem a bit less than impressive at the same time.

Speaking of which, if you happen to need a hand with core work do let me know, lately it seems to be quite my forte with GM.

[Cagar]

Just don't make organic touhou-patterns and it will be the best thing ever (made here)