Want to share some of your thoughts about the game? Do it here!
You delivered the good!! I'll make a more elaborate report (and won't miss the chance to talk about it on our discord and our podcast at Shmup'em All), but I wanted to tell you how good the game felt (I'm eager to try it without my little personal framerate problem).
It's exciting as hell!
Congratulations for living up to the hype ;-) !!!
Don't hesitate to come spread the word to our discord (there's a brand new english only thread, for the strange people who can't speak french^^).
And as a former english almost-teacher (I flunked university when I discovered heavy partying but there are still a few fragments of knowledge floating in that old brain o'mine^^), if you need a french translation, I even might be of use!
This is shaping up into something really special! I’m still getting to grips with the cube-converting and medalling but the system quickly got its hooks into me, and it’s clear there’s a lot of depth to be wrung from it. It’s visually stunning and the soundtrack reminds me of a lot of Naomi-era belters in places, especially YACK's. The whole thing is just terrifyingly accomplished already. Wishing you all the best for the rest of the project!
Game's looking spicy! It feels great to play even in this Demo stage, and I absolutely love the style and the ships! So here be my feedback:
That's all I can think of for now. Again, fantastic stuff, and I can't wait to play the final version.
PS: Will you release the game on Steam/Consoles as well?
This looks really cool.
The first-start menu controls made me give up on trying to play though.
The config screen allowed me to assign ESC ("27" I think) as UP by accident
We're forced to enter a name and we have to guess that we have to press enter to confirm confirm confirm
I know why you're forcing us to see the overwhelming controls config screen.
But in the end it doesn't matter much unless you want to appeal to non-shmup players (I'm not one). I'll try to find a video to figure out why itch really wants to promote this game to me then.
Please don't worry about me too much, I'm just one of those bad-behaved impatient players who aren't willing to think about what controls they *might* need in the game before having tried the game first. *shrug*. I'm guessing that people who are actually SHMUP fans might be more willing to prepare?...
I was able to rebind ESC back if that's what you mean. It's just that I was so unprepared to not be in a main menu but instead be forced into a config screen that I mashed buttons hoping to just get to the game asap
Just spent a happy couple of hours with this, it's great. Mind officially blown, well done and good luck with the next steps.
Some initial thoughts from moving about in it. These are really small things but I wrote them down in case it helps:
- Some 'Read Me' notes in the folder would be helpful. Took me a while to realise I needed to use JoyToKey for my joysick inputs, and had to look in the 'Feedback' forum to solve framerate slowness by changing the config. Alt+Enter for fullscreen was also helpful once I'd read it.
- 'B' to exit menus rather than navigate to exit?
- Hold direction to scroll through letters at name input, rather than tap?
- Options menu (for eg. screen, controls) at Pause screen?
- Indicate where the score you just got is located in the score table after input?
Luxury stuff:
- Slowdown feature in replays?
- Scanlines filter, a bit like in Cho Ren Sha? Would look amazing with these graphics.
Cheers!
Thank you! I'll make sure to write down some notes for that QOL stuff, all very handy and shouldn't take too long to implement. Though, why did you have to use JoyToKey? Does your joystick only use direct input without xinput support? I had to remove dinput because it was buggy, but software like x360ce should be sort out dinput compatibility.
My joystick is a Qanba Q4Raf. Acording to JoyToKey the stick is set up as the right stick on a pad, rather than the left stick. Not sure if that makes a diff, but either way it wasn't being picked up by the game.
Couple more thoughts from last night's session: Pause replays (to write notes!), stay in replays menu after Delete (and maybe Y/N for delete?), reset hi score table. Luxury: save states, or step into replays (as in Akai Katana).
Gotcha. I actually haven't added analog stick support yet so that would explain it, is there maybe a stick-to-dpad mode you could toggle?
Also good suggestions, most of it is on the list, besides savestates which while awesome would require a ton of work. Though I do plan on having "practice mode presets" of sorts that will serve a similar function.
It's good.
I'm not a shmup expert and generally find complicated score mechanics to be off-putting. I almost never play for a high score. But I think the score mechanics were presented pretty well in this case and aren't too crazy, in that they reward aggressive play and aren't too fiddly (compared with something like Ikaruga, for example). Once I realized the secondary weapon's similarity to Mars Matrix, the mechanics started to make more sense.
I really like the tutorials. I don't think I've ever seen shmup techniques explained like that in-game before. I think that helped make the game more accessible, because otherwise it "feels" like an expert shmup for expert shmup players.
The one piece of feedback I had was that I wasn't able to tell the difference between the purple medals and the silver/gold medals in the heat of battle and just collected all of them. More distinct shapes / colors might be nice. Also is there actually a point in the silver and gold medals being different? They seem to do the same thing score wise.
I'm looking forward to the full release.
Awww yeah, good to hear! Fundamentals tutorials are quite important for me, still figuring out how to make them feel less tutorial-ish, and there's a lot more to come. Having those missions be available to new players helps me not worry about the arcade mode's difficulty very much.
The silver/gold medals are functionally the same, but since it's a cycle of 3 medals I wanted to distinguish each medal in the cycle visually a bit, probably needs some work. I'll definitely fix visibility though, common complaint.
From my meager experience with shumps and bullet hell shooters, I can say that this is shaping up as a really good game.
You guys could add some border art to cover up the black bars that flanks the gameplay area for people who can't or don't have a display that they can easily turn vertically, maybe move some of the ui over there too, add some high scores to beat with the clear times listed too, along with a run timer.
Additionally, maybe you can add a graze mechanic to incentivize a more aggressive playstyle as demonstrated by the mech suit. Though that begs the question: what is the ship's hitbox? That is one of the parts where I gets me damaged most of the time besides my clear lack of skill.
Finally, how about a demo stage where we can try out the ships for a spin if you won't have some sort of codex for us to read to know what each ship's abilities are, maybe some enemy info would be good too.
Thanks! Border art/gadgets, visible hitbox, ship tutorials/missoons are planned. The run timer seems unnecessary since it's an autoscroller, but a dedicated speedrunning mode/set of missions is something I'd love to add. I think there's enough incentives for aggression as is though since you get more energy, extra enemy spawns and higher damage. Grazing tends to do the opposite and encourage herding bullets while sitting somewhere safe, unless it's Psyvariar style grazing that is.
Great game , love the old style schmups shame nobody makes em like this no more, except you! works fine in Wine on my old Mac with xbox controller.
I didn't realise you could shoot with the green ship and thought it was really fun to play just trying to get close and swipe the enemies to death, I will play that way from now on...
I think I'm very likely going to buy the game when it's out.
Any plans to have scoring tutorial stages or show the requirements for the "Goal Achieved" enemy spawning branches? Achieving this "Goal Achieved" thing or not has significant score gain difference. Would be quite nice to know what are needed to do to get them so it's easier to know how to access the Hard route.
Yeah definitely, I want to eventually add both missions that introduce players to scoring/test it and more indepth text tutorials. The goal achieved thing happens if you hit certain score/cube thresholds before reaching part of the level (only the intro level has it in the demo), I'll give more thought to how I can telegraph this kinda stuff once I flesh out the stages.