Post by bandaloo in DEAD PETALS comments

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yo, nice work! thanks for the input. i'm glad someone said it because i was starting to feel that the hyper gain was kind of slow too. honestly, my exposure to bullet-hell have less been proper "shmup-shmups" and more games like gungeon and parts of isaac (i've put so much time into those i don't even want to think about it.) which is to say, i'm still learning proper genre conventions for the shmup subgenres i'm totally cribbing. because of my perpetual fascination, i get into an arcade shmup every so often, usually bullet hell, but then i don't take it that far for one reason or another. but that's been changing a lot recently

i'm bummed i missed the Gunner Parade jam but i think i would have made something kind of mid that not a lot of hardcore shmup fans would have enjoyed

in the next few weeks i'm gonna release a sort of "definitive version" with tweaks like hyper gain, and i'm thinking another True True Final Boss. (the name for the new version is not final but what do you think of this: click here (for your eyes only)

in 1.0.5 (the current itch version) once you get past [spoiler] you'll unlock a "custom game" menu. hyper gain's not on there (i'll add it) but there's a lot of cool stuff to play with. it's been helpful as i think about how to balance the base game. i only made it an unlockable thing because i'm kind of not done with it yet.

thanks again for checking it out!

CROW'S NEST1 year ago (3 edits)

So after clearing [spoiler], a few further remarks given the possibility of a definitive version:

Regular enemies could use a lot more variety in health and relative danger posed (basically making the idea of small/medium/large/etc varieties of enemies exist, other than just them and the bosses)
Enemy count could use a lot more variety (rather than just 4 and later 5[?] per wave)
Luck items feel not very worth it, much prefer the immediate effects of any other item; it’s also a huge slap in the face when a boss drops one during the boss rush as its only item
A bit mixed on the temporary nature of the companions, I think because I couldn’t really tell when they were going to despawn
More meaningful close range shooting would be nice (outside of just making the shots disappear after a bit of distance), like increasing the player’s damage at close range or making it a spread shot

A few questions on the custom game menu/internal stuff in general:

What does “normal enemy window” do?
How does the “difficulty” number work?

re: [for your eyes only]:

If you mean the logo, it looks a bit flat at the moment compared to the psychedelic everything else the game has going on

bandaloo1 year ago (1 edit) (+1)

edit: as a quick note, the new title screen with random names is just for fun! the game doesn't increase in difficulty again.

haha, the logo part was a joke! just the name

thanks for taking the time to write this feedback. it's all excellent

will definitely give the companions a health bar. probably the heart icon will shrink
the remark about enemy variety is huge, the non-boss waves feel very samey. will start with some basic archetypes that fill the gap between "little guy" and "boss"
> 6 enemies gets nuts! but i can ameliorate that by peppering in weaker enemies. will need to rethink the "enemy window" thing which i explain below
i'll probably just not drop luck items at all during the boss rush. they're also way to common in boss rush because luck is the most likely, but you can't get two of the same upgrades so it's almost always luck when only one item is dropped. that needs to be fixed.
lastly, going to try those things for close range stuff! excited to experiment with that

"normal enemy window" is kinda weird and works like this. the game will generate 12 distinct enemies with increasing difficulty. as you progress up to the boss rush, it can pick from a moving window of 4 enemies. so level 1:

lvl 1 window: [------------] <- randomly pick from first 4

enemies: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11

final level window: [------------] <- randomly pick from last 4

so, if you increase the enemy count, and the window, you see a lot more variety per wave. but, it might be harder to identify enemies you've seen. which is only so helpful in practice, tbh. (during boss rush, it just picks from all 12 -- i didn't give it too much thought.)

"difficulty" is weird, and works different for each property of the generated bullet pattern. an enemy is generated with a set "difficulty", which gives the randomly chosen speed, spread, bullet size higher minimum and maximum possible values. once an enemy is generated though, they're set in stone. the issue is that an enemy has a change to basically roll 20s for all its stats. should have done something like a set amount of "skill points" to get more consistent results with how hard an enemy actually ends up being

without getting into too much detail, difficulty also increases "complexity." bullet patterns are a kind of "tree" of behavior and complexity makes it more likely that the bullet pattern tree will grow deeper. that's super vague, but simply put it makes it kind of behave more like a boss with various attack patterns. (in the settings menu, i don't think anything past 5 difficulty is very possible, lol)

the theme of the jam was procedural generation, and i think there's things that work about it and things that don't. i think folding in some more authored content while keeping some of these procedural generation systems to keep things fresh is the way to go. thanks again for spending time playing and thinking about it!

itch.io

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