This was fun. The sprites were nice and I felt that the music fit. I know you said prior it is royalty free but the choice was still a very good one. My run was done using only the regular shot and never switching gears or gun modes/using abilities and I was able to coast pretty comfortably past wave 50 on Normal mode for a final score of 4,638,325 doing nothing but backing up and eventually doing a slow turn circle to sweep in and pick up all of the drops. I did enjoy the idea that different colors of enemies restored different gauges (I assume this is the case. I only got to eventually see that green orbs filled health when I took my first hit at around stage 30).
To be honest I don't know how you can design the game to encourage movement beyond moving backwards and circling since that is an extremely safe and efficient playstyle but if you can I think you have a really good base game from which to build on top of. Thank you for sharing your project!
Thanks for the kind words! Survival mode ultimately isn't a focus, so I'm not sure if it will be cut or not, but the main game will actually have levels and things to maneuver around and places you can't go. As for pickups, all enemies drop the same pickups, but you only get the kind you need. As in, health won't appear if you are at full health, which leads to more money spawning. So playing well and without using your superweapons means that you get more money to upgrade your stuff with. We'll see how it goes from here, but the focus of next demo day is to have all the base weapons in and try to get a level or two going, which should be more representative of the final game.
From my understanding of it, just run the exe and it'll do its thing. If you have a zip program that's trying to open it as an archive, that will cause problems, and if your version of mono is outdated that also will also cause problems due to a bug in mono under 5(?).
I know I got a lot of comments about the size and speed of the bullets, but I promise that it plays into what I think the adventure mode should be. I do agree that they're kinda small for a wave shooter. Hopefully by next demo day I'll be able to have at least one level made so you can see what I mean by that.
Great core gameplay here. 1st run got to wave 23 on normal. I wrote down some things while playing:
Music is fitting, catchy, enjoyable. Many more tracks like that would be pleasant to listen to during gameplay.
The gear idea is fantastic. My strategy was downshifting to a low gear to kill momentum and then kick it to highest possible to quickly change direction. Personally I would rebind gears to mousewheel, but you probably have another feature in mind for that. You allow rebinds anyways so on my next play I'll do that.
I would reduce the frequency of stars. Especially when there are bullets on the screen, I cannot tell which are which. But when I played my stars did not look like they do on your screenshots. This might be because I was playing in 1080p. Furthermore, I would increase the size of bullets to make them easier to see too. What is your intended play resolution?
Escape for options would be nice, as well as being able to use arrow keys in menus.
I love the "sucking in" effect when you pick up stuff.
I see that some people don't like mouse control but I think you should keep it in as an option, it is the control style I enjoyed most of all.
I'm interested in what you're going to do with the game, I'd enjoy the adventure mode for sure. I followed!
-The music is royalty free stuff that I got just to have music for this demo, unfortunately. It's not necessarily representative of the final game but I think it's close to whatever I would want my musicians to do.
-I actually don't support the mousewheel for gears due to technical limitations I haven't worked through yet. If you have mouse buttons that have the browser back and forward, that may work out to be pretty cool
-My intended resolution is 1280 x 720. I also playtested it in 1080p without much problems. As for bullets, if you're having trouble seeing what you have to dodge, go to options, then gameplay, and enable semi-transparent pickups and player bullets. It'll make seeing enemy bullets much easier.
-You can rebind Menu to escape.
-Magnetism is life. I also enjoy how enemies burst into treats.
-It's actually designed to be a twin stick shooter, so aiming with the mouse makes the most sense out of using arrow keys to aim or something. Still, I allow rebinds of everything since the player is always right about how they feel like the control should be.
Had much more fun than I expected from seeing the .webms. Got to 60k, level 18 on normal. Not getting damaged immediately on collision, but instead risking getting stuck is very refreshing. Automatic upgrades are cool, music is alright. Was very easy to get into. Pressing Space shows that you're going turbo very well. The gear system is interesting but I never seemed to bother using 1 and 2. A potential improvement could be dropping the mouse controls, since being precise doesn't matter much. Also being able to toggle shooting would be nice too.
Yeah, gears 1 and 2 are more an adventure mode thing, since eventually enemies will detect you based on your ship's thruster output. Automatic upgrades are going to go once I get the shop in. There actually is an option to disable the mouse controls and use the arrow keys to move, just not ingame atm. It emulates controller support, and that's not fully tested. As for shoot toggling, I'm not sure that's a great idea, but I'll consider it. Thanks for your feedback!
I kinda wish the ship was less on ice, and the movement was more snappy.
Lerping rotation to the cursor position also had weird result, like stubborn ship refusing to rotate.
Otherwise it's really good,good job. Will you be able to select upgrades in the future, or is it just locked sequence and it gives you upgrades based on the amount of gold you have?
Yeah, playing the new difficulty changes last night, I really got that feeling that I should increase general accelleration of the ship. Also the turning thing actually is purposeful due to the cannon rotating individually, but it shouldn't be super terrible in its current state.
As for the future, I'm planning on implementing a shop where you can buy new ships, new weapons, upgrade weapons, sell weapons, and recolor your ship.
Comments
This was fun. The sprites were nice and I felt that the music fit. I know you said prior it is royalty free but the choice was still a very good one. My run was done using only the regular shot and never switching gears or gun modes/using abilities and I was able to coast pretty comfortably past wave 50 on Normal mode for a final score of 4,638,325 doing nothing but backing up and eventually doing a slow turn circle to sweep in and pick up all of the drops. I did enjoy the idea that different colors of enemies restored different gauges (I assume this is the case. I only got to eventually see that green orbs filled health when I took my first hit at around stage 30).
To be honest I don't know how you can design the game to encourage movement beyond moving backwards and circling since that is an extremely safe and efficient playstyle but if you can I think you have a really good base game from which to build on top of. Thank you for sharing your project!
Thanks for the kind words! Survival mode ultimately isn't a focus, so I'm not sure if it will be cut or not, but the main game will actually have levels and things to maneuver around and places you can't go. As for pickups, all enemies drop the same pickups, but you only get the kind you need. As in, health won't appear if you are at full health, which leads to more money spawning. So playing well and without using your superweapons means that you get more money to upgrade your stuff with. We'll see how it goes from here, but the focus of next demo day is to have all the base weapons in and try to get a level or two going, which should be more representative of the final game.
How do I run this on linux?
From my understanding of it, just run the exe and it'll do its thing. If you have a zip program that's trying to open it as an archive, that will cause problems, and if your version of mono is outdated that also will also cause problems due to a bug in mono under 5(?).
I recorded a video of your game.
Thanks a lot for playing my game. That was by far the most complete playthrough I've seen so far of it, so I appreciate you giving it a good showing!
I know I got a lot of comments about the size and speed of the bullets, but I promise that it plays into what I think the adventure mode should be. I do agree that they're kinda small for a wave shooter. Hopefully by next demo day I'll be able to have at least one level made so you can see what I mean by that.
Great core gameplay here. 1st run got to wave 23 on normal. I wrote down some things while playing:
I'm interested in what you're going to do with the game, I'd enjoy the adventure mode for sure. I followed!
-The music is royalty free stuff that I got just to have music for this demo, unfortunately. It's not necessarily representative of the final game but I think it's close to whatever I would want my musicians to do.
-I actually don't support the mousewheel for gears due to technical limitations I haven't worked through yet. If you have mouse buttons that have the browser back and forward, that may work out to be pretty cool
-My intended resolution is 1280 x 720. I also playtested it in 1080p without much problems. As for bullets, if you're having trouble seeing what you have to dodge, go to options, then gameplay, and enable semi-transparent pickups and player bullets. It'll make seeing enemy bullets much easier.
-You can rebind Menu to escape.
-Magnetism is life. I also enjoy how enemies burst into treats.
-It's actually designed to be a twin stick shooter, so aiming with the mouse makes the most sense out of using arrow keys to aim or something. Still, I allow rebinds of everything since the player is always right about how they feel like the control should be.
-Thank you for your input!
Had much more fun than I expected from seeing the .webms. Got to 60k, level 18 on normal. Not getting damaged immediately on collision, but instead risking getting stuck is very refreshing. Automatic upgrades are cool, music is alright. Was very easy to get into. Pressing Space shows that you're going turbo very well. The gear system is interesting but I never seemed to bother using 1 and 2. A potential improvement could be dropping the mouse controls, since being precise doesn't matter much. Also being able to toggle shooting would be nice too.
Yeah, gears 1 and 2 are more an adventure mode thing, since eventually enemies will detect you based on your ship's thruster output. Automatic upgrades are going to go once I get the shop in. There actually is an option to disable the mouse controls and use the arrow keys to move, just not ingame atm. It emulates controller support, and that's not fully tested. As for shoot toggling, I'm not sure that's a great idea, but I'll consider it. Thanks for your feedback!
Pretty cool.
I kinda wish the ship was less on ice, and the movement was more snappy.
Lerping rotation to the cursor position also had weird result, like stubborn ship refusing to rotate.
Otherwise it's really good,good job. Will you be able to select upgrades in the future, or is it just locked sequence and it gives you upgrades based on the amount of gold you have?
Yeah, playing the new difficulty changes last night, I really got that feeling that I should increase general accelleration of the ship. Also the turning thing actually is purposeful due to the cannon rotating individually, but it shouldn't be super terrible in its current state.
As for the future, I'm planning on implementing a shop where you can buy new ships, new weapons, upgrade weapons, sell weapons, and recolor your ship.