itch.io

Thanks for the review!
Levels and weapon/mod interactions are both getting reworked next build, hopefully I'll manage to get more variety in. Multishot mutations  have certain setups where I find them really powerful, but they are usually trash when equipped on the turret.

Hmm, the seed shouldn't be locked in, but between the limited enemy / wave pattern variety maybe they tend to generate in similar ways? I expect this to be less of a problem once more content gets added in.

I've never seen the weapon bug you mention, I'll try reproducing it. 

Thanks for your comments, and especially for streaming the game!

You raise a lot of good points I'm also wondering about.

I'm aiming for a wider, casual audience. I'd like the game to appeal to hardcore shmup players, and there'll certainly be ways to flex that skillset, but the overall design will lean towards ARPG mechanics and build customization. So the intention is part exploration in the vein of Star Control 2, part Path of Exile-style ridiculous build minmaxing, part twitch shmup gameplay. As such I'm pulling inspiration from all over the place and I'm not too concerned about genre conventions.

> lose the ship

The ships will be craftable and the player is expected to swap them often. I agree that currently it's not very exciting. Lore-wise, the fact that the forms you use are not human shaped is part of the vibe I'm going for, so I want to see if I can make it work despite the problems you mention.

> mouse & controller aiming

Good point about forcing player movement. I'd like for the offense to be more active, so DPS checks can to an extent be cleared with player skill instead of raw firepower. I've been thinking about directional damage reduction for enemies and/or optimal ranges.

Classic shmups are built the way they are out of necessity, given the controllers available at the time. I'm messing around to see if I can get something interesting by mixing in mechanics from dual stick shooters, survivorlikes etc, but it's possible I'll drop all that and go back to a basic shmup setup, with directional weapons + auto-aiming turrets, perhaps angle-restricted.

Gamepad aiming is a huge issue and I'm unsure where I'm going with this. Ideally I'd like the game to be playable with a dual stick setup, which would require either some kind of aim assist for the turret or, as you said, a wide cone of fire.

> reason not to push a button

The next version will have stronger and more resource-limited weapons, for now I wanted to explore a few basic designs.

Thanks for the in-depth review, I appreciate it!

Thanks! The weapon setup is something I'm still iterating on, but I'm growing attached to the scrolling shooter / twin stick shooter hybrid design space. Autofire is one route, making the faster weapons stronger but resource limited (e.g. ammo that auto-reloads when not firing) is another.

Interesting gameplay, there's a good bit of depth to it. The scanline / CRT vibe adds a lot of charm.

I was lost for a sec with the movement mechanic, I thought I'm supposed to click a target location instead of rolling to move, and it took me a few turns to understand what's happening - an in-game explanation would be nice. Locations you skip over disappear before you encounter the enemy, which makes things even more confusing, maybe add a scrolling animation?

Witch is okay, bomber is awkward at first but fun later, inventor is just great all across the board. Overall, very pleasant survivorlike, I like it.

It would sometimes be nice to have more enemies to kill, there are moments around ~4 mins left on the timer where you're just chasing after anything that'll give you more XP, before the great slime horde appears.

I'm reminded of those early 2010s fiendishly hard Flash platformers. Feels very polished, the blocks laughing at your skill issues is a nice touch.

Bro this is fantastic. I wish Armored Core leaned more in this direction, it sells the mech urban warfare fantasy so hard. Don't you dare stop developing this, I want to see it released.

At the moment I'd say readability kinda suffers, requiring LoS to lock missiles is also pretty awkward in practice, because going into enemy LoS is very dangerous so you might as well fire blind. I wonder if some kind of dash wouldn't improve the experience, so you aren't completely tied to cover 100% of the time.

Thanks for the review!  Yeah, itch had some kind of false positive thing going on, I had to bother them on discord to resolve it. Might be because I'm using an unpopular engine.
The bullet hell is all over the place at the moment as the wave procgen is very much work in progress, I think the overall density is okay but the peaks are indeed over the top.