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Wyvern936 days ago(+1)

Really, balancing shmups is incredibly complicated, we had a terrible balance during the first days in our game, I learned a lot about this during the jam, especially playing Touhou in a specific way (not shooting), I recommend you do that aswell, it is very interesting to see how enemies actually work there, I was surprised that none of the enemies in Touhou stayed on screen, they always left to give space for new enemies, and when we put that in our game it made a whole world of difference.

I think this was also why your game was really hard to figure out, the enemies stacked really fast and had to focus just on surviving and it was very difficult to figure out a path xD.

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Rieux5 days ago

I see, I should try that, doing the not shooting reminds me of Ikaruga and the achievements you get by clearing the levels by only absorbing bullets

About the enemies staying, maybe I over did it haha, in some way I wanted to create “time bombs” in order to cover my lack of mid boss and make the player kill enemies and not just avoid attacks because I thought that maybe if the player just avoided, they would get bored quickly…

I wanted to do something like Darius Burst, where the enemies go through the whole screen in swarms and you have to eliminate them before it gets too overwhelming, though, in that game you have a better tool to eliminate faster the enemies that stay longer, so I should check better this :)

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Wyvern935 days ago (1 edit) (+1)

Maybe that's why I died so much, I never use bombs if I can in these games, even if I'm going to die, I didn't know they were required to be used... I never played Darius Burst, so I don't know how they managed to do that, but every design comes with a solution, so maybe that game does something that tells the player to bomb or it is implicit in the design in some clever way. So yeah, you could do like I did with Touhou just trying different things to see how enemies behave and the different tools the player has. In my case, most of the balance of the game didn't come from just enemies coming and despawning, but enemy armor and a damage cap to balance the player's damage as it progress, these were things I learned directly from Touhou, but there are definitely other ways to do it.

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