Here. Have an average videogame character turned space-marine:
It's a mockup. Done in GM using a new sprite I made, and some old tiles of mine; lighting and touchup done with GIMP. Here's the original (sprite):
Which is a beefed up (And therefore instantly 10 times more awesome) extrapolation of this:
So, the moral of todays blog? Anything, AND I MEAN ANYTHING INSTANTLY BECOMES MORE AWESOME IF IT'S GIVEN A HI-TECH SUIT OF ARMOUR AND AN ARM CANNON.[citation needed]OK, with that overI'm having major trouble with my shmup. Here's the progress so far:
So what's my problem? (Besides the enemy drawing itself over the HUD). Simple: I suck at designing these sorts of games. I'm currently trying to wrangle out the way the game should play; how do enemies attack? How do projectiles work? How many enemies should I have on screen at a time? etc.Oh. And it now has gamepad support. Discuss.
Define an Enemy : Bullets ratio.
It helps me decide how much the enemies shoot, first.(Number of Enemies on Screen) : (Number of Bullets on Screen)Without boss encounters:Lunacy Star is about 1 : 40 on averageTouhou can range between 1 : 15 and 1 : 40 on averageCave shooters (as far as I've experienced) have 1 : 30 generally. But they're fast bullets.Difficulty can be summed up as a composite of density, speed, fire rate, and complexity of enemy patterns.What are you looking for?I would generally avoid having enemies fly into the player's face, like how the screenshot suggests.They can shoot bullets directly at you.Or in circles.Or in pretty patterns.Just be creative :V[/horrible advice™]This could be in relation to DSG's recent choices methinks.
I managed to figure out the way I'm going to do things (Galaxian style for the enemies). Basically, I have a queue of sorts that contains 'packages' of enemies. My spawner shoots out streams of enemies, waits for a certain amount of time, then moves on to the next package. There are a certain number of 'packages' per wave, then a boss will appear. As for the Enemy:Bullet ratio… I'll have to think on that one for a while.