The end screen with its "CONGRATULATIONS, YOU GOT D" cracked me up a little for some reason, I think the pacing of it turned out unintentionally perfect haha
Speaking as a player who played a lot of bullet hell shmups (and bullet hell not-shmups) and a dev who worked/is working on 4 bullet hell games - unfortunately, as far as the gameplay of CellShocked goes, there are many things that could be done better.
Starting with the huge hitboxes for the ship and bullets - for a bullet hell, this is definitely not the right way. It takes away player's options, making micrododging and risky plays impossible, and also heavily restricts the game designer by forcing them to use simpler (read: boring-er) bullet patterns with fewer bullets and more spacing. Bullet hell fans won't hesitate to burn you at the stake for using big and weird hitboxes - a lesson I learned the hard way with my own first game.
Player movement - overall, controlling the ship didn't feel very responsive, especially due to the lower framerate, and there seemed to be some inertia to its movement. Bullet hells with ship inertia exist but it's really not received all that well either. I'm not sure if CellShocked ship inertia is by design or if there is a bug/issue that causes it, either way I don't think it adds any value and only makes controls harder for no reason. Ship slowdown with spacebar (focus) - felt too slow for me, but it could also be due to having to mind the inertia and the huge hitboxes. Maybe try setting focus speed to 1/2 or 1/3 of the ship speed and see if it feels better?
Enemies - player firepower was fairly low, especially for having a narrow, focused attack, and most enemies felt too tanky. As a result, +due to not so much pattern variation, dealing with waves felt repetitive. Enemy bullets felt on the slow side but it's a matter of personal taste, and kinda necessary with the hitboxes. Again, if the hitboxes weren't so huge there'd be a lot more room for more bullets, bullet pattern variety, and also variable bullet speeds (I really want to emphasize the overgrown hitboxes as much as possible).
Lastly, there was no fps counter so not sure what the framerate was, but on a 1920x1080, 144hz monitor playing a bullet hell with less than 60 fps feels pretty jarring. The 600+ mb size download also didn't feel quite right, perhaps some assets could be optimized and compressed to reach a smaller size (improving performance in the process).
Excuse the wall of text, I only hope the feedback will be of use. Bullet hells are my favorite genre so I'm always happy to see players and devs try their hand at it. Congrats on finishing the jam!
Viewing post in CellShocked jam comments
Thanks for the feedback, I definitely tweaked the timing on the final screen to be a little comedic :D
There is a lot to improve in the bullets for sure, I have not figured out yet how to do compensation for the velocity so the movement adds velocity to the bullets that are spawned (You could also take advantage of this to increase the firing rate of your ship by moving upwards strategically). I may need to re-write the bullet spawner entirely to be more flexible and more optimized. For the jam I threw it together within a week and had to move on to the other aspects of the game. I noticed in Rotschwert the enemies will start shooting after they sit still, and that was something I explored but the way I coded the spawner didn’t enable it to work in its current form.
The hitbox is definitely huge in the large mode, and could have been telegraphed a little better perhaps with a different colour on the central flower which is the true hitbox. And when in small mode, it is just the sphere.
I think the inertia you are feeling might stem from the framerate or lag issues, as I did not code in any inertia to the movement (unless you are extremely highly attuned from your schmup playing experience!). Did you try out the graphics settings in the options and see if the lowest setting might help out? Graphical fidelity and improving performance in all types of hardware is still an ongoing learning for me in using Unreal Engine 5. For sure this type of game is not something I want people to need a beast of a PC to run. The file size is also something I have to work on, I think I can get it down to half the size by re-packaging it without the additional unused assets.
I’m glad for the feedback. I find it hard to get to know people who are open to giving very detailed feedback and to teach others, such as yourself. Would love to connect with you on Discord to talk more!
I just tried playing with "Bad" graphics and it definitely felt a lot better, with a framerate which I'm still not sure about but which definitely reached 60 fps or higher! The inertia was also gone.
I didn't play to completion but noticed a couple things I didn't notice before:
- The left and right screen borders are not sized the same, the left one takes more space while the right one takes less
- When trying to move diagonally into the bottom screen border, the ship slides. Maybe it's part of the reason I thought there's inertia
- When going into focus/small mode, you can no longer move diagonally
As for the last bit - there is still a lot left to learn so I don't think I'd make a good teacher, but I'm open to share thoughts and stuff ^^ Handle is @wingedfoxdev, I'm on the bigmode server but didn't message much yet, maybe we can chat there!