Gall of the Thrall

[ACWraith]

Here's an early gallery first to if you wish to avoid my giant wall of text.
https://plus.google.com/u/0/photos/1183 ... 3794727473


Hi, I've been visiting this forum for years but never posted anything. I didn't even realize I already had an account. Sadly, my first post is to pimp my unfinished wares, but there's a worse confession: I'm a wannabe credit feeder with no will/patience for memorization. I'll watch every STG Weekly and Bullet Heaven episode. I'll collect games. (Two of which were from Bullet Heaven contests. Thanks again, Ser!) However, I'm unlikely to get a 1CC because I move on to the next game too quickly in my giant Steam pile of shame.


My Project: Gall of the Thrall

I've made Gall of the Thrall in part to force people like me to get 1CCs. It's uses that dirty phrase "procedural generation". However, rather than being endless like some other games, the player is given a choice to "turn back" after every level. Once turning back, the choice is final and the player must survive as many levels as were completed. Winning the game means turning back and surviving. Losing the game results in a complete loss of score. It's 1CC or nothing. There are three lives and no extends. The player must learn to gauge their own skill.

Each level lasts a mere minute and features overlapping waves of enemies. When a wave is gone, another of increased difficulty replaces it. The rate of difficulty increase grows with each level.

To compensate for the reduced predictability of overlapping patterns, an enemy's bullets are cancelled when it is destroyed. Meanwhile, the player has a special weapon, called a Trawl, that shoots outward and, on the return trip, does damage to enemies/bullets. Activating the Trawl while it is already in play teleports the player to its position.

Being a fan of GundeadliGne, I initially allowed the player to flip direction. This then changed to allowing a full 360 degree pivot (and greater speed) when not firing. Once firing, you're stuck strafing as one might expect... It's sort of my compromise between horizontal and "vertizontal" since I want to use the screen space and don't have a nice swivel monitor for true tate.


Scoring:

I have not implemented a score server yet, but the plan is to include the generation seeds so that players, if they wish, can deal with the same levels to be on an even playing field. The Mersenne Twister implementation I'm using should, in theory, be consistent across platforms.

The score system is rather simple. I don't tend to appreciate milking or long combos so there aren't any. It's all about killing fast and choosing which of the overlapping waves to focus on. The base score depends on the current level difficulty. Each successive enemy wave increases in potential score. Each successive enemy destroyed within a wave grants more score than the one before it. Killing all of the enemies within a wave adds a multiplier that lasts for the rest of the level.

Since risk/reward is such a big factor, each death increases the permanent score multiplier. (It multiplies the multiplier.) A skilled player could choose to immediately die twice and then play the rest of the game on their last life for maximum scoring potential.


If you need even more rambling, here's the Google+ post I shared that gallery in:
https://plus.google.com/u/0/11835705741 ... aPCCUdfMfz

[ACWraith]

It's been a while, but here's a few new pics. Sadly, they still don't manage to capture the pretty scrolling clouds in my background so they look bland as frell. https://plus.google.com/u/0/photos/1183 ... 2827491889

Please forgive the player model as I have yet to determine how I want to distinguish the random silhouette's front from its back. I might just bail and create a constant mesh.

The HUD now displays a multiplier so I can keep the play field free of partial score spam.

I've toned down the bullet trails because I kept dodging them needlessly. I've reserved the brighter trails for a new type of circular bullet which does not get cancelled when the shooter is destroyed. Since all of my bullets maintain steady velocities, I required an alternative to projectile acceleration to maintain danger on the opposite side of the screen. These bullets also force the player to use their Trawl if they want to get rid of them so players will get used to activating it before the larger bullet swarms arrive.

Meanwhile, I've added the option of more loops. The total number of loops is the number of levels finished before turning back. (Going forward one and back one is a single loop awarding no extras.) Overall, players will have control over the length of their loop and how many they can attempt, but a death in any loop still results in the score being nullified.

As I've played my game many times now, my primary concern is probably adding different backgrounds and enemies for variety. The color and shape changes are nice, but there's only so many masks people will want to shoot in the clouds. (My attempt to reference an older project will probably be confused with poor juiciness anyway.)

At some point I need to add music too. I've been leaning toward 1 minute vignettes with layered singing. However, I need to set time aside alone in my house to record them and I dread turning my furnace off to avoid background noise.