Hey guys. So I've been developing a TSS called Railgun Express for about the past 10 months now and I just discovered this forum today. I've always enjoyed shmups but have never really considered myself a "shmup fan", but when I decided I wanted to work on a decent sized game project it seemed like a good road to go down. I'm also happy to see some developers of games I've been a fan of in the past, so I guess I'm in good company here.
A bit about my game: it's a TSS with a twist (isn't there always a twist?), and that twist is you're on a rail and have no control over your movement. Instead each stick controls an independent gun, allowing you to shoot in two directions at once. It's a 2D vertical scroller, using tile based backgrounds with parallax scrolling and some nifty lighting effects. It's written in C#/XNA and will initially target XBLIG and PC, but may be ported to other things as well (specifically Vita and Android with Moba support, and possibly Ouya as well) if it does decently. I'm not writing this game to try and make the next big thing, but rather to write something that I can point at and be proud of and say "I made that". Ok, so I'm not doing the art, so I guess I'll have to give my artist some credit too. "We made that".
Anyway, despite the fact that I've been working on it for 10 months I only consider the game about half done, and maybe less than that (and by the time it actually comes out XBLIG may not even be around anymore). I have the core tools for the game done, the core gameplay and rendering mechanics in, but not much in the way of functional levels or bosses done. The first part should be quick though since one of the tools is a very robust level editor, which should allow me to crank out some levels pretty quickly, and then it's just balance after that.
All that said I wanted to post some videos up here and get feedback from a community that actually cares about games like mine. It's still not too late for me to add in some mechanics to the game, but I didn't want to overdo it. I'm always open to suggestion, and even moreso from a community such as this one. I am NOT a shmup expert (though I was the first name listed in Nintendo Power with a 999,950 score on 1942), and will happily listen to anything you guys have to say about the game.
http://youtu.be/sIVjyar4e7Y
http://youtu.be/_yS54XU1Ht4
You can also check out my site where I talk about the development some:
http://www.allmessedupgames.com
Also a couple of notes:
- The enemies will not stay that bullet spongy
- The particles have already been tweaked since the creation of those videos to be less chaotic and all over the place.
- I'm still trying to figure out a good defense since you can't control movement. There obviously having destructible enemy shots like missiles, but nothing much for bullets yet aside from kill them before the can shoot you. For some reason the idea my artist and I seem to like the best is being able to do a slice attack with swords (controller by the triggers) to swat away incoming shots.
- Sorry, but it will require a twin stick controller of some type unless someone can think of a good way to make it work with a keyboard.
Thank for reading my very verbose first post here!
-Randy