CYGNI: AGB | Steam, PS5 and Xbox Series 2023

[Udderdude]

I don't get why they didn't just make it an all-directional shooter instead of having the player's projectiles fly all over the goddamn place.

[reckon luck]

am I seeing screenshake in this preview clip? I hate it in any game, but to add it to a shmup is just... baffling.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

Screenshake generally sucks, yeah. Hated it in Monolith and Downwell. You could at least turn it off in Monolith.

Score Rush is about the only shmup where it was acceptable because it was a mechanic; the screen only shook when you used a bomb or destroyed a large enemy, and the screen shaking was an indicator that you were fully invulnerable to damage and could move whereever you wanted to safely during the shaking.

[Steven]

I thought this was supposed to be a twin stick game, but it looks like you can just shoot straight and your shots just magically go to the enemies. I guess that's a way to do it. It's good that the game is still in development and this is probably very early footage because they need to fix the awful framerate. Guessing the devs never played Tatsujin Ou because if they had they'd have known to not make enemy bullets both tiny and the same color as the explosions.

[Steven]

This is going to be playable at Tokyo Game Show, along with Radirgy 2 and probably some other stuff. I will be there, so I'll try to not forget to check it out.

[Necronom]

I think it looks very promising:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TbXQnc3nkg

[ExitPlanetDust]

This is going to be playable at Tokyo Game Show, along with Radirgy 2 and probably some other stuff. I will be there, so I'll try to not forget to check it out.

Did you get to play it? I would love to hear your impressions.

I’m a sucker for style-over-substance shooters like Philosoma, One, and Astebreed. They’re fun to sit down and play for spectacle. It’s especially nice if they are mechanically sound enough to feel shmupy.

[Steven]

This is going to be playable at Tokyo Game Show, along with Radirgy 2 and probably some other stuff. I will be there, so I'll try to not forget to check it out.

Did you get to play it?

Nope.

[kid aphex]

I don't get why they didn't just make it an all-directional shooter instead of having the player's projectiles fly all over the goddamn place.

Exactly. This game should’ve been a twin-stick and embraced the reality of modern gaming.
I don’t think the developer is capable of pushing the genre forward in that way.

…


This game has always given my heavy Xyanide vibes.

[Lemnear]

I think it looks very promising:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TbXQnc3nkg

THIS is the technical level of graphic that i want in a modern SHMUPS !!!
I can't judge the gameplay...but since the publisher is Konami, why they choose for Cygni instead of...something like idk "Gradius Forever" ???

Hovewer all the future 3D SHMUPS should look like this.

[kid aphex]

THIS is the technical level of graphic that i want in a modern SHMUPS !!!
I can't judge the gameplay...but since the publisher is Konami, why they choose for Cygni instead of...something like idk "Gradius Forever" ???

Hovewer all the future 3D SHMUPS should look like this.

Can you imagine if the follow-up to the masterpiece that was Gradius V ended up being this? Yikes…

[Lemnear]

THIS is the technical level of graphic that i want in a modern SHMUPS !!!
I can't judge the gameplay...but since the publisher is Konami, why they choose for Cygni instead of...something like idk "Gradius Forever" ???

Hovewer all the future 3D SHMUPS should look like this.

Can you imagine if the follow-up to the masterpiece that was Gradius V ended up being this? Yikes…

I prefer to consider Cygni a "Technical Test", maybe for a future Gradius.

[Nautilus]

Hello everyone,

Appreciate the continued Discussion about Cygni here,

I think if I were to address every comment it would take too long, so I will try to answer key questions more for clarification purposes.

First I hope everyone understands that we can’t compare Cygni to other Shmups such as Gradius etc. as much as we all love the classics, Cygni is its own thing and has its own gameplay mechanics.

Is it a full Twinstick? Yes and no, well somewhat, it needs dual analog sticks and practically almost every button on the controller is used one way or the other (some of us prefer playing with Keyboard and mouse) . But you can’t aim and shoot 360 degrees in the air, it's limited to the upgrades and only roughly 15 -30 degrees left or right shooting, and use the twin stick mostly for ground targeting (there is also a lock on mechanism). So does it make it like a typical twin stick shooter? Not really, it makes it halfway there perhaps.

Homing projectile, what are those? An upgrade, you can determine how much in percentage your outgoing bullets can turn or Home onto nearby targets, the catch is, it's weaker and diminishes forward shooting strength based on the percentage you put the bullets need to home, so players can choose this strategically.
Example: you can enter a narrow passageway with enemies on both sides and front, you can focus on the front enemies with one muzzle while the other two muzzles will shoot homing left or right at 50% per bullet homing, killing smaller enemies and weakening larger ones. It's up to the player how they manage their weapons based on their gameplay style. You can switch this on and off during gameplay in real time but determine once before battle percentages and movements..

You will probably get hit a lot. This is not a pure bullet dodger, sometimes we ram into enemies shooting while recharging shields. If you can see every single bullet on screen, great, but it can be a difficult game on hard mode.

If Konami is the publisher why didn’t they make Gradius?

When we decided to make Cygni, Konami was not in the picture yet, we wanted to make our own unique shooter outside any established IPs or norms, we wanted not to be afraid of breaking rules, experiment and make something we saw ourselves dedicating long hard work and time and be motivated to do so. We didn’t simply want to “just make another shmup and call it a day” and be lost in the sea of Shmups coming out on mobile and some others on PC at the time.
At that time the industry was just coming out of VR or was within the craze of VR, nobody wanted to invest in anything else let alone a niche genre such as a shmup which everyone saw belonged on mobile phones during train rides.
We had to do something so dramatically different that could capture the attention and worst case maybe have a chance at kickstarter while at the same time making it true to what we wanted it to be. We wanted true depth gameplay in terms of shooting mechanics, Making 3d Shmup anything is very difficult if you wanted it to look right, making it with true depth is almost rare, and good luck with that non orthographic camera, we wanted large groups of enemies, and yes 16:9 vertical we didn’t want the horizontal, we came up with test of tilting the camera to make up vertical space, use environments as aspect ratios sometimes, and yes some Camera shakes (subtle nothing too much in your face, in 3d we needed that, we could include an option to turn it off no promises yet), and already coming from animation backgrounds we wanted to create meaningful high quality short CG cutscenes. We even tried to make it work and test it with some inertia at the start, it wasn’t too bad most casual players loved that over linear, but we decided to drop it later on when things narrowed down.

So we created the prototype Cygni.

This caught the attention of the press first and then Konami, which we were more than grateful for, Konami being a giant in this genre immediately understood and backed what we were trying to do, they didn’t want to come and impose their own IPs on us and tell us, look take what you’re doing and now create Gradius for us, that would’ve destroyed everything we worked for on Cygni and not even once was that their intention which we tremendously appreciated.

People should know that no one anywhere was talking about Shmups on the higher echelon or the notion for revival of any of these classics. They thought the genre was dead or dying. We were able to convince many of them with a lot of hard work and time, that no, look what we can do and just give the whole thing another shot. The support from our partners and reception from gamers was very positive and we are to this day ongoing with work, who knows maybe one day doors will open for other classics to be remade in the future.

It has taken incredible amount of challenges to get Cygni where it is today, and we still have a bit more ways to go, we have always been a very small team tackling very big technical and visual challenges some would say highly risky for an indie company, we don’t have big cash for RnD or experimentation anywhere, we have a moderate limited budget (possibly less than what other games make from medium successful kickstarter campaigns) and the blessing of Konami. But when a game comes out no one would ask about all this, the end result and product is what matters in the end.

[ExitPlanetDust]

Is it a full Twinstick? Yes and no, well somewhat, it needs dual analog sticks and practically almost every button on the controller is used one way or the other (some of us prefer playing with Keyboard and mouse) . But you can’t aim and shoot 360 degrees in the air, it's limited to the upgrades and only roughly 15 -30 degrees left or right shooting, and use the twin stick mostly for ground targeting (there is also a lock on mechanism). So does it make it like a typical twin stick shooter? Not really, it makes it halfway there perhaps.

This reminds me of the twinstick mode in Under Defeat. Very cool.

I’m looking forward to seeing more. Will there be a demo available? I’m sorry if that was asked before.

[soupbones]

It has taken incredible amount of challenges to get Cygni where it is today, and we still have a bit more ways to go, we have always been a very small team tackling very big technical and visual challenges some would say highly risky for an indie company, we don’t have big cash for RnD or experimentation anywhere, we have a moderate limited budget (possibly less than what other games make from medium successful kickstarter campaigns) and the blessing of Konami. But when a game comes out no one would ask about all this, the end result and product is what matters in the end.

This game really looks amazing. Love the speed of everything right now - looks super twitchy.

The idea of it being a sort of twin stick hybrid, and having some choices to make when it comes to your strategy is what I'm looking forward to the most. Always down for creators taking some chances and doing something different.

Any chance that this is dropping before the ned of the year? I noticed it's up on the PSN store, but still as "Announced".

[Lemnear]

Hello everyone,

Appreciate the continued Discussion about Cygni here,

I think if I were to address every comment it would take too long, so I will try to answer key questions more for clarification purposes.

First I hope everyone understands that we can’t compare Cygni to other Shmups such as Gradius etc. as much as we all love the classics, Cygni is its own thing and has its own gameplay mechanics.

Is it a full Twinstick? Yes and no, well somewhat, it needs dual analog sticks and practically almost every button on the controller is used one way or the other (some of us prefer playing with Keyboard and mouse) . But you can’t aim and shoot 360 degrees in the air, it's limited to the upgrades and only roughly 15 -30 degrees left or right shooting, and use the twin stick mostly for ground targeting (there is also a lock on mechanism). So does it make it like a typical twin stick shooter? Not really, it makes it halfway there perhaps.

Homing projectile, what are those? An upgrade, you can determine how much in percentage your outgoing bullets can turn or Home onto nearby targets, the catch is, it's weaker and diminishes forward shooting strength based on the percentage you put the bullets need to home, so players can choose this strategically.
Example: you can enter a narrow passageway with enemies on both sides and front, you can focus on the front enemies with one muzzle while the other two muzzles will shoot homing left or right at 50% per bullet homing, killing smaller enemies and weakening larger ones. It's up to the player how they manage their weapons based on their gameplay style. You can switch this on and off during gameplay in real time but determine once before battle percentages and movements..

You will probably get hit a lot. This is not a pure bullet dodger, sometimes we ram into enemies shooting while recharging shields. If you can see every single bullet on screen, great, but it can be a difficult game on hard mode.

If Konami is the publisher why didn’t they make Gradius?

When we decided to make Cygni, Konami was not in the picture yet, we wanted to make our own unique shooter outside any established IPs or norms, we wanted not to be afraid of breaking rules, experiment and make something we saw ourselves dedicating long hard work and time and be motivated to do so. We didn’t simply want to “just make another shmup and call it a day” and be lost in the sea of Shmups coming out on mobile and some others on PC at the time.
At that time the industry was just coming out of VR or was within the craze of VR, nobody wanted to invest in anything else let alone a niche genre such as a shmup which everyone saw belonged on mobile phones during train rides.
We had to do something so dramatically different that could capture the attention and worst case maybe have a chance at kickstarter while at the same time making it true to what we wanted it to be. We wanted true depth gameplay in terms of shooting mechanics, Making 3d Shmup anything is very difficult if you wanted it to look right, making it with true depth is almost rare, and good luck with that non orthographic camera, we wanted large groups of enemies, and yes 16:9 vertical we didn’t want the horizontal, we came up with test of tilting the camera to make up vertical space, use environments as aspect ratios sometimes, and yes some Camera shakes (subtle nothing too much in your face, in 3d we needed that, we could include an option to turn it off no promises yet), and already coming from animation backgrounds we wanted to create meaningful high quality short CG cutscenes. We even tried to make it work and test it with some inertia at the start, it wasn’t too bad most casual players loved that over linear, but we decided to drop it later on when things narrowed down.

So we created the prototype Cygni.

This caught the attention of the press first and then Konami, which we were more than grateful for, Konami being a giant in this genre immediately understood and backed what we were trying to do, they didn’t want to come and impose their own IPs on us and tell us, look take what you’re doing and now create Gradius for us, that would’ve destroyed everything we worked for on Cygni and not even once was that their intention which we tremendously appreciated.

People should know that no one anywhere was talking about Shmups on the higher echelon or the notion for revival of any of these classics. They thought the genre was dead or dying. We were able to convince many of them with a lot of hard work and time, that no, look what we can do and just give the whole thing another shot. The support from our partners and reception from gamers was very positive and we are to this day ongoing with work, who knows maybe one day doors will open for other classics to be remade in the future.

It has taken incredible amount of challenges to get Cygni where it is today, and we still have a bit more ways to go, we have always been a very small team tackling very big technical and visual challenges some would say highly risky for an indie company, we don’t have big cash for RnD or experimentation anywhere, we have a moderate limited budget (possibly less than what other games make from medium successful kickstarter campaigns) and the blessing of Konami. But when a game comes out no one would ask about all this, the end result and product is what matters in the end.

Thank you for these information.
Didn't know that Konami entered later in the project, and yes, i'm aware that is a niche genre...but if it's fun, it's fun, niche or not and if a big publisher like Konami chooses to publish you, there's a reason, especially for someone that usually reuse their brands over and over, so
Hovewer this is problably the best looking SHMUP in history technically speaking and will put in shame games like Aleste Branch and Tatsujin Extreme! Those seems to be less graphical demanding than Cygni is and by a large margin.
What i said before was "WHAT IF Cygni opened the path to a new Gradius?" i mean, Konami is bringing back Metal Gear and Silent Hill, there are some possibilities for Gradius (or a new Castlevania) at this point...maybe.
Good Luck anyway!

[AntiramDSR]

yay... the next Sine Mora. Reinventing the genre.

[Lemnear]

yay... the next Sine Mora. Reinventing the genre.

Why spit on the works of others?

[dmk1198]

Amazon telling delayed til 2025 lol hopefully in reality just a month or two? Easter 2024?

[Nautilus]

Amazon telling delayed til 2025 lol hopefully in reality just a month or two? Easter 2024?

Don't go looking in Amazon for that kind of info, your estimates are more grounded in reality : ).

Cheers.

[donpuzo]

no one anywhere was talking about Shmups on the higher echelon or the notion for revival of any of these classics. They thought the genre was dead or dying.

Some players would only be happy with a dead genre... Keep up the good work and do your game, not theirs: you will NEVER please certain kind of people.

[neorichieb1971]

I think it looks very promising:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TbXQnc3nkg

I hope those white laser beams aren't HDR intensified my eyes will bleed.

To be honest I am finding it hard to see whats going on from that gameplay. Several bullets hit the ship and nothing happens and there are far too many focus points.

This is outside of the conventional so we need to wait and see. It will be interesting to see how it does considering I Feel the hardware it runs on isn't the type of hardware a lot of shmuppers actually have.

The level 5 boss looks good. Different colours, easily seen projectiles.

[Rastan78]

I hope those white laser beams aren't HDR intensified my eyes will bleed.

It kind of has that look tho doesn't it? Agreed that would be visual overload. Seems like they need to make the explosions less bright so they don't compete with bullets.

[Nautilus]

no one anywhere was talking about Shmups on the higher echelon or the notion for revival of any of these classics. They thought the genre was dead or dying.

Some players would only be happy with a dead genre... Keep up the good work and do your game, not theirs: you will NEVER please certain kind of people.

Thank you!

I think it looks very promising:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TbXQnc3nkg

I hope those white laser beams aren't HDR intensified my eyes will bleed.

To be honest I am finding it hard to see whats going on from that gameplay. Several bullets hit the ship and nothing happens and there are far too many focus points.

This is outside of the conventional so we need to wait and see. It will be interesting to see how it does considering I Feel the hardware it runs on isn't the type of hardware a lot of shmuppers actually have.

The level 5 boss looks good. Different colours, easily seen projectiles.

Thanks, NO HDR in the game is used, its pure gamma/brightness control with one slider under the hood. And Gamma can be adjusted from options menu, it is important to do this since it can affect brightness factors on different monitors which can later affect amount of bloom on screen among other things. Ex. In the video the gamma is adjusted slightly more and contributing to heavier contrast, each player has different preference on this so we ended up just giving that control to the players.
Each level will have its own theme, so while some levels may be very dark and stormy, others more daytime. We are constantly adjusting and grading the color and brightness to fine tune within context for each level differently.

If the bullets hit the ship you have a few different effects that take place, a very subtle cam shake, vibration (controller), large circle that expands as a radius from center of the ship and slight reddish screen dimming + sound Fx. Since the ship moves fast and everything around you is happening very fast, all attention is on the center ship itself. There is also half a second invincibility time between each hit (sort of like old arcade ships flickering only in Cygni you don't get flickering on the ship it just takes into account that half a second for in-between hits) Otherwise you will die almost instantly when a barrage of bullets hit you one after the other in very short period of time.

Best and happy New year to you all!

[TyrianMollusk]

Cygni has a demo now on Steam.

[Steven]

I played it and I hate it. Among other things, visibility is far worse than Battle Garegga or Tatsujin Ou and it's basically impossible to tell for certain WTF is going on because everything obscures everything else. I also have no idea how to actually play this game, as the HUD is very unclear about what is what and there are a million buttons to press to do different shit. Where is my health? Where is my ammo counter? Where is anything else except for six trillion enemy lasers and bullets that overlap with each other and my own shots and the explosions and cause massive confusion because almost everything is the same color? I have no idea. The game is a mess of light and explosions and it's highly overwhelming.

Colorblind people could find this game completely unplayable depending on what type of colorblindness they have unless there are some colorblind options that I missed. One of my friends who plays STGs is colorblind and has difficulty in games like Tatsujin and Kyuukyoku Tiger because of this, so it is something that's been on my mind recently. Given how enemy shots are constantly all over the place and my non-colorblind self has difficulty tracking them, I can't even imagine how hard it might be for someone with a type of colorblindness that affects their ability to play the game in a manner that essentially renders enemy shots invisible to them.

For those of you who are considering playing this with an arcade stick, I wouldn't; it's twin stick-ish enough that you'll be missing control functionality without a mouse or second analog stick, although I think it might work, albeit awkwardly, if you really wanted to play it that way. There are so many buttons to use here that even if you do play on an arcade stick you're almost certainly going to be doing some awkward hand contortions just to play the game semi-properly, as I think every single button on a regular console controller, including L3 and R3, does something, but I'd have to check again. On the subject of it being kind of twin stick-ish, I feel the game would be better if it actually was a twin stick shooter; the design makes me feel as if the game was initially designed as a regular twin stick shooter and then after making it the devs decided to severely limit the twin stick controls for some arbitrary reason and didn't redesign the game to match, resulting in an awkward mismatch between what the player can do and how the enemies are placed. There is the homing shot, but it feels like sticking a band-aid on some dude whose femoral artery has been severed.

Everything seems to have relatively high HP, resulting in a Tatsujin-like experience where everything has bloated HP and takes forever to die, but unlike Tatsujin, that includes the zako, of which there are so many that you can forget about killing all of them because it's not happening. Enemy placement is all over the place and highly chaotic, but not in a way that seems like it was designed with a specific intent or purpose other than having lots of enemies everywhere. I highly prefer games where the enemies are where they are for specific purposes. This is something that games like Daioujou, Kyuukyoku Tiger, Radiant Silvergun, Ikaruga, and even the comparatively primitive Tiger-Heli do exceptionally well; everything is placed to serve a specific purpose, whether it's for chaining/scoring or for the purpose of scaring the shit out of the player in order to get them to move to an unsafe area where the game will spawn more enemies in order to trap and kill the player. None of that is really here from what I have seen; everything is just... here. It's only the first stage, so maybe it gets better later in the game.

It does also run like shit (30~45 FPS) even on the lowest settings and playing on the highest settings gives basically the same performance, but that's probably because I am below the minimum required specs, so I can forgive it for now. I haven't tested it on the Steam Deck yet, but I am planning to just to see how it runs, although I am expecting it to run quite poorly because of the PS4-level hardware. Maybe the smaller screen will help with visibility, but some of the enemy shots are kind of small even on my 29 inch monitor, so maybe it will make it worse. That said, my GTX 1080 isn't that far below the minimum, which is the RTX 2070, which is basically the same thing but with hardware ray tracing and I believe roughly equivalent to the PS5's GPU, so...

Note to the devs: having your graphics thing be a combined preset low/medium/high/ultra is NOT how you make PC games properly. Everything should be configurable separately. You have AA separated, which is a start, but everything else, like texture quality, SSAO, particle effects, post processing, anisotropic filtering, shadows, and all of that should be separate.

Also, mouse sensitivity for the ground attack thing is INSANELY HIGH, to the point where the ground attack thing is basically completely unusable with a mouse. It's fine in the tutorial, but once you play the actual game it's borderline uncontrollable. The oddest part is that the aiming when you aren't using the ground attack seems perfectly fine. I didn't see a mouse sensitivity option, but maybe I missed it. I'd try it with my PS5 controller but it doesn't work for some reason no matter how I configure Steam's input options.

Speaking of options that don't work properly, the game always reverted every setting to default whenever I closed and restarted it, which I discovered when I was cycling through various Steam input settings to try to get the PS5 controller to work, which I never did manage to do. It's a demo and maybe/hopefully an older build, so maybe/hopefully these things have already been fixed.

Ultimately, I don't think that people who are into arcade STGs or more traditionally-designed console/PC STGs, which is a lot of people on this forum, are the target audience for this game, and that's fine, so yeah.

[Nautilus]

Hi Steven,

Thanks, appreciate this feedback and play experience.

Ofcourse I respect your personal preference and will not comment on that. I would've advised studying the tutorial first and Key binding sections if you feel like having a go at it again. It's not a bullet dodger or like some other Shmups, I think you will get it once played over a few times, use homing missiles on swarms and groups you'll see that you will be able to destroy dozens at a time and on later upgrades and levels in the game often times reaching 60 + at a time and so on.

Just for clarification on a few valid points we are working on, some also based on feedback:

Regarding Mouse/controller sensitivity, this was our bad, wrong values punched in at the last minute for the Demo build made default values for sensitivity very high, some of which can be altered by the options menu Gameplay section. Was too late after the upload for us.
This has since been corrected.

Ship speed being too fast, notably with controllers, some players asked for a setting to tweak here, We are working on providing a solution to this since playing on Mouse/Keyboard vs controllers can vary to a degree. We hope to provide sensitivity Options settings for the value changes so people can tweak depending on different controllers they use, this can make things much more manageable for some. Adding to the above Ship speed has been since quickly tweaked by a small margin but the subtle change already made the ship movement smoother with controller analog sticks.

High HP on some larger units: This will be addressed and toned down by a certain percentage so even non- fully upgraded player ships (as in the demo) won't make them feel spongy and instead kill them much faster. (Cygni will spawn more units the more you kill for a planned period in the level so making them less tanky can be of benefit here as well). We are still balancing these but the Demo is helpful for us to get feedback of all kinds to address what feels right in specific areas.

Game reverting back to default settings on exit: Is a bug we are looking into it, Sorry for the inconvenience on this.

At the moment it is a bit CPU heavy, we are constantly trying to optimize where we can and a few red areas we would like to tackle. The first level is a large one so it varies from one to the other.

Graphics scalability settings will be touched upon before the final release. Can't promise to expose everything in options as a lot is inter connected.

Lastly not all units or midway bosses are meant to be "killable" easily on first try without upgrades, there is also the factor of Co-op to consider, where two players (one focusing on air units while the other focuses on ground units helping each other out), to play with a bit more strategy.

For the Twin -stick, it was designed from the start to be limited.
Reason: A ) we didn't want to go down the full TwinStick path, B) with Pattern designer later you could add patterns example facing 90 degrees Left and Right and then with the extra limited turn on the analog you can get near 110 degrees of Rotation and you can have up to 5 such patterns, shooting at every which direction you plan to, so you can imagine you'll be able to put together whatever you need there for it.

Hope this was a bit more helpful.

Thanks for giving it a try.

[Steven]

Believe me, I stared at the key bindings for a while and played the tutorial before I went anywhere near the game lol. I also went back to the bindings after playing the tutorial. It's A LOT of stuff to throw at the player all at once.

I did try it on Steam Deck a few minutes ago and it gave me an error about Visual C++ Runtime not being present. Playing Windows games on Steam Deck can be a pain due to it using Linux, so I'll see about figuring it out later, but this game is clearly aiming for a level of graphical fidelity that the Steam Deck is just not capable of, which is exactly why I want to try it anyway to see what happens. At the very least, battery life will almost certainly be abysmally short, so it's not really feasible at all to play this game on that system.

[TyrianMollusk]

It's A LOT of stuff to throw at the player all at once.

Sure, but let's be clear that there's nothing wrong with a game having more complex play and input systems to match it. Just because it takes the player time to get good at the basics of playing a game is not a bad thing. I do agree that they need to work on the onboarding process, or they will bleed refunds like nobody's business. Throwing you into levels designed to be a pain without upgrades, and with only the most rudimentary grasp of what buttons do (some of which you can't actually use yet, and some of which are quite confusing, like moving energy between weapons and shield--is that merely to sacrifice power for a little more survivability and then shift it back if you got by? Being mapped to bumpers makes it a primary control, so it must be something you use a lot) makes for a very questionable first impression, and while roguelite players may expect to start off gimped and slog though the early upgrades, this is very rare in shmups and that arc probably needs to be emphasized more, rather than simply assumed because there's an upgrades screen (which you can't even see right away, so you don't know how gimped you're starting).

I do think the tutorial was tedious and does not really get the player going, not to mention that whoever came up with adding that painful failing-CRT noise should be dragged into an alley and beaten. I think the game could really use some training mode with some basic elements you'll see in the game, where you're given a partially upgraded ship and tasked with some things that show the utility of various options. Eg, is there a reason to swap ground attack between homing and manual, because the manual is horrible on controller with the reticle-pushing, and at least the homing seems to help you know what ground targets are supposed to be in play, something that's seriously confusing to a player who doesn't know every enemy placement and might for example shoot at literal TANKS rolling by on the ground that seem to just be background...

Speaking of the ground target, I'd suggest trying an option to change that to a positional combination where you have range scaling on LT's analog and direction controller with RS. Otherwise, ground lock-on is basically the only playable controller option and you might as well add a setting to stick to that and remove the toggle so we don't accidentally flip it (which I was having trouble with, probably in part because you have your left/right crossed with triggers being RIGHT/LEFT for shooting/ground but the stick-click mode toggles are LEFT/RIGHT for shooting/ground).

Also, I've obviously only played the game a little, but the default controller layout suggests a lack of proper intentional design, with the above notes plus key actions conflicting with using RS and seemingly less-key actions on your RS-compatible buttons. You also need to account for stick-clicking buttons being an abomination that should basically never be used, and various new controllers we have that can swap those click inputs to much more viable (and very importantly, RS-compatible) under-buttons. If this has all been properly thought through to ideally suit the game, then I assume I'll come see that over time, but if someone just kind of figured this was good enough (as seems to often be the case with controller layouts), it's almost certainly not.

[Nautilus]

@Tyrian

Well noted, we will review some key points from community feedback and already a few are in the oven, thanks.