1-1: exactly what I'd expect form a first stage.
1-2: Had to bomb the stage part, boss part was good.
2-1: midboss lasts too long.
2-2: By the time you can read the white bullets, they've likely trapped you already (I played whichever difficulty Z selected, the harder of the 2 I think) Boss patterns also seemed to last too long, probably because they were rather monotonous.
Oh right: I PoC'd immediately before the Stage 2 boss...and had it appear right on top of my sprite. Insta-cheap-death.
What kind of ship sprites do you wanna have in your game? Considering that minimalistic "oldskool" overall design i suppose some pixelart should be fine. PM me with your suggestions or let's go talk on IRC ;)
Also just played the game on advanced. My conclusions:
+ overall it looks awesome! I mean really, better than previous one.
+ some nice patterns and bullets
+ music is good to listen
+ Shottype seems pretty balanced too.
- still getiing confused between items and bullets. You should make their sprites surely identifiable
- either deny drawing hitbox at all or make it more visible, like mark it with different color
- something wrong with deathbombing. I mean does it even exist? Sometimes i bombed right after been hit but lost a life anyways. So besides some short deathbomb interval add a longer one during wich player cant waste a bomb.
- difficulty curve is kinda rough. Some stuff happening on stage 2 is ridiculous for stage 2 (i'm scared about later stages). Forcing player to use lots of bombs on earlier stages is not a good idea.
Ah and it needs some backgrounds too. Feels kinda hard to read those random lasers against black for some reason.
Here's a quick video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddRzKXAt5_g) of me failing. And there's some problem too. Program instantly goes "fullscreen", but it not really fullscreen, it uses desktop resolution (guess what happened to my fraps on 2560x1440 :colonveeplusalpha: ) But even on decreased resolution program draws only 640x480 square on video capture. So i had to do such a perversion as set my screen to 720x480 and record with it >_<
So I'm guessing the main difference is presentation?
Excellent work regarding the video, with the bonus, you should have gotten some 25,000,000?I wasnt playing for score (especially when having no idea of how scoring in this game works).
My high is 37, and some other person got 39.
Fullscreening controls are the same -_-;You'd better either switch it to default well known Alt+Enter or make a note like "Press F4 to fullscreen" at the start. And as i said, it doesnt work like real fullscreen, making video capturing a pain.
I figured that I would cut out the possible complaints from people and default it to fullscreen this time, haha
What color should the hitbox be, then..?Red should be fine.
Those green triangle bullets give me a hard time about that. To remedy, I tried to make points darker, but I might add outlines to the green bullets and the points anyway.There are a lot of differently shaped items falling on player. You should unify their appearance, dont let them form any "patterns" and lower their falling speed. Also there's too much variety in small bullets, and sometimes they look completely like points and vice versa. Look at any touhou game. Even when there are some special items (like cherry, time or faith) they dont mess with the bullets.
Nice patterns? Hahaha~Several "death fairies" in a row is a bit too much imho for 2nd stage >_< Also, be careful with "lasers everywhere" :ohdear:
It's supposed to be less Touhou, and more Cave, is the deal.
Also, LS1 didn't really support lasers. LS2 does.
There will be lasers everywhere.
Just... spaceships. One again, if anything does gets made, and I like it, then I'll ask to use it :)I wont make just some random ships without any certain tips on how they should look (especially when you're not sure you'll like'em) It's a subject of discussion and i ask you again to PM me or go to IRC to talk about it ;)
General idea is that in terms of size, it goes Saeiretore > Proteus > Rugamatra and that they're around 64x64 to 48x48.
I wasnt playing for score (especially when having no idea of how scoring in this game works).You'd better either switch it to default well known Alt+Enter or make a note like "Press F4 to fullscreen" at the start. And as i said, it doesnt work like real fullscreen, making video capturing a pain.Red should be fine.There are a lot of differently shaped items falling on player. You should unify their appearance, dont let them form any "patterns" and lower their falling speed. Also there's too much variety in small bullets, and sometimes they look completely like points and vice versa. Look at any touhou game. Even when there are some special items (like cherry, time or faith) they dont mess with the bullets.Several "death fairies" in a row is a bit too much imho for 2nd stage >_< Also, be careful with "lasers everywhere" :ohdear:I wont make just some random ships without any certain tips on how they should look (especially when you're not sure you'll like'em) It's a subject of discussion and i ask you again to PM me or go to IRC to talk about it ;)
Is that bitch throwing tanks at you?
After playing against Masagara a bit I think I can comment on the attacks.
The first one - Seems fair enough
Laser Sweep - I feel like the lasers activate a bit too quickly. By the time I notice one's about to appear on me I'm pretty much dead. Do they activate faster in this attack than the others?
Protection - Just too easy. Compared to the rest of the attacks anyway.
Black and White - I have no idea how to survive this. It may just be screwing with my head and there's an easy way to do it, but having to go through the whole game to practice it makes it hard to figure out. I'm probably overthinking it.
Laser Maze Rain - This is a nightmare, which is unfortunate because it looks it would be fun if it didn't overwhelm you completely. So yes, I agree with making it easier.
Greatsword - I like this attack, so more health is always good, especially if the sword keeps going further each time. Actually, I might like it even more if there were a bit more bullets too.
Final attack - Another cool one. The difficulty seems just right.
A practice mode would be nice, yes. Also, something weird happens when I press z in the highscore screen. If it's supposed to be doing something I'm not sure what it is.
Saeiretore's Will is still my favorite attack in the game, but if it must be nerfed, then so be it. If nothing else the health could maybe be reduced a bit.
And one last thing: does the game display your graze count anywhere, or do you have to wait until the end to see it?
Wait until active = 50 frames
Destroy self = 150 frames
A graze counter under the multiplier should be good enough.
And the weird thing I mentioned is when you go to the highscore screen from the main menu and press z, it makes a sound like you just selected something and takes you back to the score list for gear axis.
Saeiretore's Will takes some drastic misdirection up the sides of the screen to avoid those aimed parts. Then I rush to the other side as fast as possible while zig-zaging up and down to avoid the white bullets, basically unfocused the whole time. It's probably harder than it should be if you compare it to everything else, but Masagara's final is still harder, so it's not like it makes no sense as a final attack.
I believe that I fixed that in the latest download... Do you have a version of the game prior to this post? (http://www.shrinemaiden.org/forum/index.php/topic,12115.msg827846.html#msg827846)Pretty sure it was from that post, i saw it sitting on my desktop from a while ago, saw you posted an update and downloaded the update and finally played it last night.
If so then the bug in question had not been addressed at the time of your download.
Because it isn't really happening for me anymore.
Not resetting the score on continued runs
Masagara's "Tele-Attack" being horridly unfair
The bullets coming in such a variety of colors makes it hard to tell if you're about to collect pickups or projectiles
System requirements for Game Maker 6.x:
Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows 2000, Windows XP
DirectX 8 or later
DirectX 8 compatible graphics card with at least 16MB of video memory (32MB or more recommended)
Pentium or equivalent processor
DirectX 8 compatible sound card
64 MB of memory or greater (noted only in official Game Maker help file documentation)
800?600 or greater screen resolution with 16-bit or 32-bit colors
Versions 6.x and the .exe files from those versions do not work with the Microsoft Windows Vista or the Windows 7 operating system, due to an incompatible compression implementation in its creation of executable files. Version 7 of the program, however, works correctly with Vista, as well as most supported functions in versions 5.x and prior. On 24 June 2007, Mark Overmars released a program to convert .exe files created with version 6 to work on Windows Vista.[16]
50 FPS is the default FPS, to allow the engine to process more in terms of bullets and graphics.
The 90FPS equivalent advertised is actually 75FPS :V
That error comes from not unpackaging the ZIP because the game will not load correctly compressed.
I'm sure the time that has passed has rendered your problem near irrelevant now, correct, Yao-Kun? I'm sorry for neglecting to reply :ohdear:
Not until I can get the newest version of Game Maker and/or a laptop with Windows XP because my development platform dislikes the new Windows :(The stage 5 themes are good. Radical Laser Underworld sounds quite atmospheric, and Nuclear Sex Hell sounds good for a stage 5 boss, just needs to be a bit more bossy, though. I still likes it.
Sorry ~
So the most progress I've made would be the fifth stage BGMs.
(The fifth boss theme doesn't really sound too final-boss-y to me though :( )
If you wish, you can have a listen here: http://soundcloud.com/taizenchisou/sets/lunacy-star-second (http://soundcloud.com/taizenchisou/sets/lunacy-star-second)
http://soundcloud.com/taizenchisou/sets/lunacy-star-second