Thanks for the comments so far. I really appreciate it!
The game seemed to run with inverted colors when I run fullscreen (white background, orange ship) - but windowed was fine, no graphics or sound glitches.
Strange. I've always had odd, inexplicable corruption problems with Allegro palettes and dealt with them by putting giant arrays before and after the palette array declarations as a form of padding. Maybe there needs to be more padding...
But I'll put windowed mode is an an in-game option. Possibly the glitches are just because my computer is getting a little long in the tooth.
Some suggestions for the menu - if the player enables joystick control it would be nice to navigate the menu with the joystick. Also, you have to press enter to select menu items, but then you have to press Z to start the game - that's confusing, you should allow both.
Yeah, I think I'll add this. The menu interface definitely needs work.
I'm curious as to why you've required two buttons to be held down for the 3rd shot.
Probably because I don't have a gamepad :). Actually I found that having three buttons in GoCL confused my brain somehow, so that I would find myself pressing two buttons at once and becoming subliminally frustrated that they weren't both working. Having two buttons with a special function for both together seems to fix that, maybe because choosing to press both at once becomes a conscious decision. Also, I think I remember people not liking being unable to fire all three weapons at once in GoCL so I thought I'd head off that complaint at the start. But I'll look into adding 3-button controls as an option.
The heavy cannon needs some kind of charge indicator - a sound effect, and maybe a graphical effect to let you know it's fully charged. The seekers seemed fine.
I didn't want to add a charge bar to the display, because it would be cluttery (although you can tell that it's fully charged when the two little jets come out the sides). But I think a charge bar would make some things a lot nicer, including the spinneret's bomb reload. I'll give it a try.
Anemone - nice main gun, pretty satisfying - I like how the ship pulses when it fires. The short range version of the sword didn't seem as useful as the long range. Getting close enough to use the short sword feels too risky, making me want to always use the long range one. The faster swing on the short sword isn't enough of an incentive to want to use it. Perhaps the short sword could sweep away smaller enemy bullets, but not the bigger boss bullets.
The short range blade does far more damage, though. I contemplated letting it block bullets, but giving some ships defensive weapons would make it even harder to get the balance right (the same applies to the open hand).
Spinneret - the orb beams are cool, very original. I think they should extend faster though - you're punished for releasing fire, because it takes a long time to extend the beams back out, and this makes the player not want to switch weapon.
Yeah, the spinneret is deliberately tricky to use, because its weapons are pretty powerful.
Hand of Xom - this was my favorite ship, probably because I didn't have to hold down 2 buttons to play it properly, but also because the hand weapon is cool. I would like to have some control over the reticule though - with it fixed you have to get very close to enemies, and you can't catch enemies that are low on the screen.
Hmm, I'll try this out and see how it works.
Personally I find the open hand useful in taking down any large enemies (it does a bit more damage than the closed hand).
Finally - change the color of the orange enemy bullets, they look too much like the explosions and player bullets. A few times I thought the returning hand of xom was an enemy bullet chasing me!
This is actually trickier than it sounds because of the limited palette space. I was planning to leave this in as part of the challenge.
Some of the weapons took a little figuring out, exactly how to use them (one was a charge weapon? And when/how does the bomb renew?)
The bombs just reload by themselves. And the Butterfly's heavy cannon and seekers are both charge weapons (they are most efficient at full power, and not very efficient at low power).
At the moment I think my only suggestion is to slow down some of the enemy shots. They seem a little too fast given your ship's speed and what I feel is the "sweet spot" pace for your games. A little slower would seem to lead this more into the "tactical" contest I think it should be - a little less twitch, allowing the player to fearlessly go into a storm of bullets and hit the right trigger for the necessary weapon.
I'll think about this. Probably stage 3 will have a generally slower pace.
Thanks!
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White Butterfly (Minor update 27 January '09)
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