Thanks everyone for the highly constructive criticism! I'll answer some of it below, but this will make a lot more sense if I explain some of the ideas behind the game:
- I'm trying to avoid letting the player enter the zone where they can focus on one part of the screen and follow everything else with peripheral vision. I demand full concentration! At all times! Excellent Bifurcation was an extreme example of this but things like the rotating options in GoCL are supposed to force the player to ration his or her attention between more than one thing at once. What can I say, I prefer optimisation to maximisation :)
- The weapon system is supposed to encourage the player to choose weapons with complementary functions. Because of the way the weapons level up through use, if there was one weapon which was good in all situations the player could just kill everything with that and forget the other two. This is why, for example, Vapour Orb does about three times as much damage per unit time as Sunshower - if they were comparable you could get away with using Sunshower for everything.
Now for the comments:
brog said: don't completely decouple them, but have them faster than they are now. like, for each additional weapon recharging, 25% less charge is added per time step.
I'm considering adding a choice of ships. One will be like the ship is now, where when using one weapon it works at 100%, with two they are at 50% each and three are at 33% each. The others could be, say, 80%/65%/45% and 60%/60%/60%. Just a thought.
brog said: finally made it to level 2, and it's visually confusing: the fire/explosions are the same shape as enemy bullets and a brighter colour.
Noted, thanks.
monoRAIL said: My gamepad didn't seem to work - I have an Xbox controller with USB adapter using the XBCD drivers, it didn't respond in the menu at all and the calibrate joystick didn't seem to do anything either. However, it worked fine with joy2key.
I guess Allegro doesn't recognise those drivers. Oh well. I haven't implemented joystick control for the menu, though, because it doesn't really lend itself to analogue input and I don't have a gamepad with a digital pad to test digital input on.
Pixel_Outlaw said: Also as said before the enemies should be easier to kill off. It's only important that the enemy delivers their shots before being destroyed, they don't really have to stay around because of high HP.
Destroying enemies is supposed to be a challenge because of the way they level up the weapons.
Adigun A. Polack said: Plus if you can, could you please add a continue feature plus a limited amount of continues to use per new game (like three (3) continues, at the most!), hmm?
I'm not sure. Continues always seem to me to be an arcade game thing which is out of place in PC shooters. Instead GoCL sort of deals with this by giving lots of extra lives (each 2,000 points) which will come a bit faster when I get around to making the bosses give you points. Not sure how I let that one slip past my fine-toothed QA efforts.
Olick said: This does lead to me wanting to pick a weak weapon for spam shooters, and a nice, strong one for the stronger enemies, making me choose a balanced set instead of an unbalanced one.
Yep, that's the plan!
2bears said: there were a few times when I got the equivalent of shmup vertigo
Excellent! That's also part of the plan :)
monoRAIL said: Oh, and the rear-firing seeker one is very weak I think. It might be better if they lasted a little longer before they self-destruct.
Hm, maybe the worms are a bit weak at the beginning. They come into their own in stage 2, though.
Tim W. said: The game works perfectly here. Banners looked fine, though you need motorherp to confirm this. (you can PM him in case he misses this thread)
Thanks, will do.
Got to run... bus to catch.
SHMUP-DEV » SHMUP DEV COMPETITIONS » SHMUP-DEV Competition 2k7 Round 2 [COMPLETED] » Official Entries
Garden of Coloured Lights - Completed!
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