Shoot 'em Down by Pennycook 2021-05-05T13:32:51Z
I really enjoyed this!! I adore shmups, bullet hells, etc., and this was a unique take going down! Makes me wanna make a shmdown lmao
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → Nick Howard
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Au | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 48 | Deeper and deeper | Lure of the Yamabiko | jam | 1187 | 3.36 | 3.63 | 2.58 | 2.52 | 3.08 | ||
| 2020 | 46 | Keep it alive | In This Moment | jam | 3.00 | 2.50 | 3.50 | 4.00 | 3.50 | 3.50 |
I really enjoyed this!! I adore shmups, bullet hells, etc., and this was a unique take going down! Makes me wanna make a shmdown lmao
I really liked this a lot! Instantly understandable, controls felt snappy and everything was responsive. My only complaint would be when having tons of buildings and enemies on the screen, everything showing just a green glowing health bar it was kind of confusing to know just how many enemies were there just at a glance. But other than that, this is really cool!
This has a really amazing potential to be something great! With such a short time frame, it's completely understandable that some stuff, like a story or whatnot couldn't be easily thrown into the game. The look and feel of everything is spot on! I just feel like I lack a purpose of why or how I should do anything. I kind of got a self-sustaining thing going while raking in points, but would be better to have some sort of purpose to it as well.
But like I said! This has huge potential to be really addicting and cool!
I really enjoyed this! I've always enjoyed text based adventures and this was super nice. Like others have said, I feel like some of the other items really needed some more purpose, but overall was enjoyable!
Shooters will always have a close spot in my heart and this was the first one that was diagonal! Such a cool concept. Sure it took a bit to get my head into the movements associated with the controls, but it was do-able and really nice! I'd love this as a full, fleshed out game!
This was really fun! I really enjoyed the do a run, die, spend some points on upgrades aspect. I ended up doing a similar thing, as well, but this was super well put together. For my screen, however, the UI was super, super, super tiny, however. Still really nice! I could see this being a decent phone game with some more polish.
@pdotjpg Thank you for the feedback. I really went back and forth if I should have all bullets with a white outline or not, and ultimately decided to just leave them as the top-most render layer. Guess it was the wrong choice, haha. I plan to revisit this game / this concept later and make actual levels / themes for the levels instead of just pulling from random things for everything.
@excy I had no idea if mixing these styles of games would work or not, but I found myself playing it while testing more than intended and seems to be a good combo! Just need more polish to really get it feeling right. As for the upgrades, I almost had the class written that lets me make upgrades with a fixed title, icon, price, and level / point requirement, and (in theory) the upgrade screen would pull from that accordingly and not have duplicates... however, I just ran out of time, so I kept the testing "randomly generate everything" filler in place since it did half-assed get the job done. :shrug:
Thank you all so much for the great feedback! This is definitely going to be an idea I want to seriously polish and work on in the near future.
@kamilo Thank you so much! :D
@binaryspark The Touhou series are some of my favorite games. I’m glad you found it polished, haha. I felt like I seriously left a lot under polished. I did make the left-shift a “focused” movement, but it could have definitely been slower. I think I just did a half speed instead of something way slower. Thank you for your feedback.
@euix I appreciate the feedback here a lot. I have a tendency to rely on “randomness” for “expanded content” but what it really is is just “a few things jumbled around each time,” so I do appreciate that being said. When I eventually revisit this style in the future, I’m thinking of having a Touhou-like story progression, bosses with themed levels, and when you die while playing, it would restart you but give you more tailored upgrades. But I definitely do recognize that I have a tendency to think randomness would make infinite cool stuff instead of “well this is just kind of like last time but not really…” I’ll work on it! :)
@peachtreeoath I love roguelites (actually working on one in my spare time!) and I love bullet hells. I felt like it was something I hadn’t seen anywhere else, either, and I wanted to make it a reality. Definitely, when I revisit this, I’m going to really flesh it out!
@shoc Thank you so much for the kind words! I really meant to make the coins have an enlarged radius around them so they would “fall” towards the player for collection but I got so busy doing last minute things I completely forgot. But it was definitely on the todo list! I just ran out of time, haha.
@sleepystudios Thank you very much! I really like this die-and-improve system. I think in the future I’ll definitely make it the further you progress the more powerful / impactful the upgrades are to help get you through the entire game. About the left over bullets, I went back and forth of “should I despair all the bullets an enemy spawned when they died or just leave them” and ultimately left them, but forgot I had some bullets spawning at 0 moveSpeed… ^^; I’m glad you enjoyed it!
Thank you everyone for the feedback!
This was so cool. Like other have said, the audio really pulls this together amazingly. If you wanted to add some extra over-the-top polish, look into boids! It would make fish (or birds for that matter) swimming together in schools and interaction with other entities look super natural!