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n_n_n_n2 years ago

This game is great! Definitely the best shmup on Playdate so far, and certainly the most complete. The graphics are top-notch. I would totally pay for a sequel/longer version with more stages and lives/checkpoints/powerups. (Like, $9.99 for a version with 5 levels or so)

I personally think the enemies have too much health -- I think with more enemies with less health each (and more firepower for the player) you could get some REALLY exciting action going on. Also, if you die during the boss, the boss music continues playing when you restart the game and the playdate crashes.

As it is it works great as a memorizer/puzzle kind of shooter, but I think you've got the framework for something amazing here.

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digikerot2 years ago

Hiya,

Thanks for the feedback - I genuinely really appreciate it (and also the bug report - I've uploaded a corrected build for that).

You are probably right about the amount of health the enemies have being a little on the high side - I was actually have pretty serious performance issues on actual hardware for a lot of the development of this until I figured out that localising the Trig maths functions would cut down the CPU usage by literally 40%, so I ended up dropping the number of spawns and nudging the HP up a little. It gets a little hard to figure out if you have the balance right with this stuff once you've played through it enough to autopilot through it due to knowing where things are going to spawn. Live and learn, I guess - as it is, I've actually got pretty significant overhead for throwing more on screen at once now.

I'm not too sure if I'm going to do much else with this one at this point - I'm already feeling a little bad that I put my other project to the side for long enough to work on this one, and I'd probably need to come up with at least another 4-5 enemy types and a couple of extra background visual gimmicks (plus some new bosses), and maybe some actual powerups, for me to consider it as being worthwhile. It's certainly something I've been thinking about, but I do have some other stuff to try and finish before looking into it.

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n_n_n_n2 years ago

Thanks for the reply! 

Yeah, I've also found that a lot of playdate optimization is simply not using any of the provided functions in the C library...  ^^;

Really excited to see what you come up with next. And thank you for the updated build! This game definitely needs some more promotion.

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