This game is purchased instantly on the day of arrival, played the demo and totally love it, this Awesome shoot em up game has it all, so looking forward to playing the full version and not long now, Excellent work guys, both thumbs up from :)
Hi ! Oh my god, TF4 is one of my favorite shmups... Do you plan a Linux build ? :-) (or at least a Steam Play compatible version ?) Keep up the great work !
I am a huge shoot-em-up fan and these are my thoughts so far. The enemy ship fire is too fast in and too often when the game begins. The player ship is only just about able to find the spaces required and it feels like some cheap deaths. The player ship fire is far too weak to combat what is happenign on-screen. I am absolutely fine with it being like this and getting hectic quickly. but your ship needs to be able to survive and at the moment it feels more like a dodge fest than me taking the game down. The sprites, music and overall aesthetic are fantastic. I hope that you will add a CRT option or filters at the very least. keep this great work up, i am very much looking forward to it's release.
The balance has been tweaked a lot since then and we're still chipping away at it at the moment. Current version is overall a bit easier than this demo, IMO.
In the full game you can unlock several filters, including a few different CRT options, by obtaining high scores.
Don't know what to say beyond the fact that I am looking forward to more. I'm not very good at shmups, but this was really enjoyable, and reminded me of Biohazard Battle I realised while editing my video that I didn't utilize the controls properly, so I'm gonna play it again now I understand the controls
Awesome demo! I'm truly terrible at this genre of game, especially in such a short play session. It was a lot of fun despite my own ineptitude. Definitely a tough game! I must have forgotten about changing my ship's speed and I bet it would have come in handy. The ability burst through enemy bullets is a great idea and one I regrettably underutilized.
The music is wonderful and I love the detailed art and unique designs. The Blue power up was by far my favorite of the three styles.
Unfortunately I don't have much feedback to give because I don't have a lot of experience in this genre. I personally thought it was difficult, but not in a bad way.
Nice music, great graphics, speed setting felt a little unnecessary (fastest always best) spin button should be c - moving fingers between keyboard levels feels difficult ingame
After a tough battle trying to get a sorry B rank with the help of keybinds on stage 02(S01 went much better) I'm finally ready to post. I like the different speed settings although being a shmup your ship still moves too much even with the lightest of taps at the lowest speed. Good variety of settings especially the background dim. In stage 01 in the part where you descend to the final boss's location, you're able to 'lean' against the wall without destroying your ship and not being able to shoot at all. I'm not sure how you're handling the player's bullet system but it might pose a problem in the future if you decide to include terrain like so. Despite some frustrating elements such as 'secrets' like extra lives spawning outside the playable area and if you kill that specific enemy too soon, it doesn't even spawn(occurred mostly in S02, bikers on highway), burst being frustrating as it doesn't activate instantly as soon as you hit that key, only a bit later(either it's not clearing the bullets within instantly or the activation itself isn't instant) it's still a fun short demo nonetheless. Some other bugs include being able to pickup your preferred weapon type and restarting the level with it instead of being reset for bonus score and sound not working after clearing a stage, and mid-result you restart the level. Quick suggestion to add an option to disable/enable the game pausing if it's not focused, can't take a quick screenshot in fullscreen like this.
Stage 02 seems to differ from using burst at all given all the safe spots available(and you can shoot from them with all 3 weapon types)on boss arenas so I'm not sure it's intended at all.
The bottom green zone is practically an entire safe spot and the 'tank' tends to come close enough to hit once in a while.
And on the S-02 final/stage boss, same thing happens here, mostly on the first phase as the second one requires you to just do one simple loop around the boss once in a while. Also, bomb spam with laser/shotgun is overkill for sure, allows you to mostly skip any and all boss mechanics in practically no time. Ship's size compared to its hitbox is too big as well, please reduce it. Best of luck on your game, you've convinced me to finally pick up Dariusburst.
I'll look in to the burst not working (You might've just been using it the same frame a bullet hit you?) and the sound breaking. A lot of the other bugs I know about (leaning on walls and restarting being weird in general) but were a more complicated issue to fix.
Safe spots are a problem certainly, the stage 2 miniboss one is pretty easy to fix by just adding a bit to his lower hitbox, but for the stage 2 main boss I'll have to tweak the pattern. The weapons are designed in such a way that even if you get behind a boss you still can't hit it much (the homing shot is suppose to disallow aiming for enemies behind the player) but ideally they shouldn't be able to get into that situation in the first place (though I guess a couple minor ones on easy isn't the end of the world).
Sorry for the late reply, here's a webm of the burst delay which is what I'm complaining about. Please download it and slow it down enough during playback in your video player of choice as both visually and audibly you can see the ship turning and hear burst activating before I'm hit. I've kicked the audio up a little bit as I was having some issues incorporating sound into this one webm, so it might be quite loud.
Also, DS4Windows can and does have issues with Windows 10. If you're willing to deal with some minor headaches on some systems, the final beta build of SCPToolkit works great with DualShock 4 pads instead. Just make sure you have an official Sony brand one to be safe and a usb cable since I've found that Bluetooth support can be spotty too at times
Not sure if I'm a bad player or burst lasts too short - can't use it effectively at all. Also - when I broke gates using green ship - bullets still aiming to broken gates.
Took a couple of tries but I cleared it, just barely. Can't seem to shield through the spinning flamethrowers, but who cares. S-ranked first stage, C-ranked second. I played enough shmoop 1 to get the design and rhythm you were going for, and I expect my ass to be properly kicked on the third stage, as per protocol.
>I have no bombs and I must dodge homing flame throwers
Keep up the good work, faggot. Glad you cut back a little on the unholy randomization. Sacrificing points to switch my weapons is annoying, but I'll take it if it means I can get a level 3 laser consistently. Homing and spread are for queers.
Oh man! Somebody who actualy played Shmoop 1! Most of that game was just practice making games in order to make this one. It shows a little better in the boss fights than the rest of the game,but I generally learned a lot about what works and what doesn't in shmup design from that.
Thanks for playing, and glad to see you stuck with it. Spread shot is life, shotgun strats all day.
You should remake the stage 3 boss in some way. That one had really fun patterns.
Anyways, here's some feedback after trying to play the bloody thing for score:
Spread seems to be best for score, but point-blanking doesn't seem to increase the multiplier any faster during boss battles
Homing would be great in some areas if it could hit the enemies half the time. It's alright against the stage 2 boss due to the blind spots, but it's still more efficient to just laser bomb it to death. It also really sucks at maintaining or raising the multiplier for some reason. Maybe I'm using it in the wrong places? Or is it meant to be that way? I find it to be unfriendly to use for any situation, even for the second half of the first stage.
Mid-boss spawns/parts don't give any score, I thought I was milking when I actually wasn't
Bombs no longer stock upon reaching 0, is that a bug or not?
Are there secrets or do I just suck at finding them? I've only found 3 extra lives, but nothing much outside of that.
You'll probably fix the enemy values later but I'll list it here anyways
Stage 1 thruster entrance multiplier, I think it's supposed to be there but I just want to confirm its existence
Stray bullets upon defeating a boss during a certain attack. Might want to lengthen the bullet-clearing time to get rid of that.
I've figured out how to break into a 6X multiplier on both stages so far, could reach upwards of ~230k by the end of stage 2 assuming I can get a perfect run. Might be able to go higher if you can elaborate on how the stage clear bonus is calculated. My score sometimes drops by as much as 10k for reasons I don't really understand.
Outside of all that, I don't have much to complain about. I think having three speeds is redundant since you can just tap-move or focus instead, but seeing that you kept the system from Shmoop 1, you've probably found some practical use for it. I haven't found a reason to go less than top speed. Difficulty is about on par with classic arcade normals, stage and boss designs/patterns are both quite good, I find. It's certainly far from awful, generic, or being pointlessly difficult. Breakables for extra points would make it a hell of a lot better I think (breaking the legs of the stage 1 boss, breaking the shields before the mob during stage 2, maybe blow off the head and legs of the stage 2 boss, etc).
The small change to the burst mechanic makes it a lot better and doesn't feel like half a death anymore. Burst might prompt more use (outside of boss battles specifically) if you can exchange something for the multiplier (such as a special attack, temporary damage boost/level 4 attack, just something in exchange for cancelling [X] amount of bullets or exchanging [X] amount of multiplier to make it a little friendlier for non-scoring players/1CCers), but doing so might require the entire game to be re-balanced or changed entirely. It's certainly better than before, but it's still not quite fun to use. I don't exactly recall how the burst was in the initial demo, I might be imagining the invulnerability time and cancel radius to be increasing with each multiplier. I can't really tell since I'm something of a death-bomber, but it feels like that on higher multipliers. If I'm not imagining it, I'd say it's a good addition. If I am, I'd say it might be a good addition.
That's about it from me. It's good the way it is, but there are a lot of little details you can add where you'd want it or a player might expect it. It's fun enough that I've found myself playing for score at this stage of development. If you can clean up the point values, add a few more break bonuses, and polish the burst mechanic a little more, I'd say you'd hit a gold standard. All that should be left after is the presentation and how all the mechanics come together.
← Return to game
Comments
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
Is there any way to reset all settings/options to their defaults?
There is not an option for that to my knowledge.
Thank you for your reports btw! We have your issues in our bug tracker.
Looks like you can modify settings.json.
this feels like how a overdose would be as a game
Thanks for playing the game~!
This game is purchased instantly on the day of arrival, played the demo and totally love it, this Awesome shoot em up game has it all, so looking forward to playing the full version and not long now, Excellent work guys, both thumbs up from :)
Thanks for playing!
We're just waiting on Nintendo now, so we're anticipating the date announcement as much as you are!
I'm happy to wait, I know this games more than worth it, Thank you for making this Awesome game :)
SHOOT EM UPS 4 LIFE!!!
Hi ! Oh my god, TF4 is one of my favorite shmups... Do you plan a Linux build ? :-) (or at least a Steam Play compatible version ?) Keep up the great work !
Yes and yes (the latter might even be possible right now, I haven't checked).
Woohoo, thank you so much :-)
I am a huge shoot-em-up fan and these are my thoughts so far. The enemy ship fire is too fast in and too often when the game begins. The player ship is only just about able to find the spaces required and it feels like some cheap deaths. The player ship fire is far too weak to combat what is happenign on-screen. I am absolutely fine with it being like this and getting hectic quickly. but your ship needs to be able to survive and at the moment it feels more like a dodge fest than me taking the game down. The sprites, music and overall aesthetic are fantastic. I hope that you will add a CRT option or filters at the very least. keep this great work up, i am very much looking forward to it's release.
The balance has been tweaked a lot since then and we're still chipping away at it at the moment. Current version is overall a bit easier than this demo, IMO.
In the full game you can unlock several filters, including a few different CRT options, by obtaining high scores.
Don't know what to say beyond the fact that I am looking forward to more.
I'm not very good at shmups, but this was really enjoyable, and reminded me of Biohazard Battle
I realised while editing my video that I didn't utilize the controls properly, so I'm gonna play it again now I understand the controls
Nice work!
Awesome demo! I'm truly terrible at this genre of game, especially in such a short play session. It was a lot of fun despite my own ineptitude. Definitely a tough game! I must have forgotten about changing my ship's speed and I bet it would have come in handy. The ability burst through enemy bullets is a great idea and one I regrettably underutilized.
The music is wonderful and I love the detailed art and unique designs. The Blue power up was by far my favorite of the three styles.
Unfortunately I don't have much feedback to give because I don't have a lot of experience in this genre. I personally thought it was difficult, but not in a bad way.
Nice music,
great graphics,
speed setting felt a little unnecessary (fastest always best)
spin button should be c - moving fingers between keyboard levels feels difficult ingame
After a tough battle trying to get a sorry B rank with the help of keybinds on stage 02(S01 went much better) I'm finally ready to post. I like the different speed settings although being a shmup your ship still moves too much even with the lightest of taps at the lowest speed. Good variety of settings especially the background dim. In stage 01 in the part where you descend to the final boss's location, you're able to 'lean' against the wall without destroying your ship and not being able to shoot at all. I'm not sure how you're handling the player's bullet system but it might pose a problem in the future if you decide to include terrain like so. Despite some frustrating elements such as 'secrets' like extra lives spawning outside the playable area and if you kill that specific enemy too soon, it doesn't even spawn(occurred mostly in S02, bikers on highway), burst being frustrating as it doesn't activate instantly as soon as you hit that key, only a bit later(either it's not clearing the bullets within instantly or the activation itself isn't instant) it's still a fun short demo nonetheless. Some other bugs include being able to pickup your preferred weapon type and restarting the level with it instead of being reset for bonus score and sound not working after clearing a stage, and mid-result you restart the level. Quick suggestion to add an option to disable/enable the game pausing if it's not focused, can't take a quick screenshot in fullscreen like this.
Stage 02 seems to differ from using burst at all given all the safe spots available(and you can shoot from them with all 3 weapon types)on boss arenas so I'm not sure it's intended at all.
The bottom green zone is practically an entire safe spot and the 'tank' tends to come close enough to hit once in a while.
And on the S-02 final/stage boss, same thing happens here, mostly on the first phase as the second one requires you to just do one simple loop around the boss once in a while. Also, bomb spam with laser/shotgun is overkill for sure, allows you to mostly skip any and all boss mechanics in practically no time. Ship's size compared to its hitbox is too big as well, please reduce it. Best of luck on your game, you've convinced me to finally pick up Dariusburst.
Thanks for playing!
I'll look in to the burst not working (You might've just been using it the same frame a bullet hit you?) and the sound breaking. A lot of the other bugs I know about (leaning on walls and restarting being weird in general) but were a more complicated issue to fix.
Safe spots are a problem certainly, the stage 2 miniboss one is pretty easy to fix by just adding a bit to his lower hitbox, but for the stage 2 main boss I'll have to tweak the pattern. The weapons are designed in such a way that even if you get behind a boss you still can't hit it much (the homing shot is suppose to disallow aiming for enemies behind the player) but ideally they shouldn't be able to get into that situation in the first place (though I guess a couple minor ones on easy isn't the end of the world).
Also,the 1-up from the biker is a joke. He only drops it if he pops his wheelie.
Sorry for the late reply, here's a webm of the burst delay which is what I'm complaining about. Please download it and slow it down enough during playback in your video player of choice as both visually and audibly you can see the ship turning and hear burst activating before I'm hit. I've kicked the audio up a little bit as I was having some issues incorporating sound into this one webm, so it might be quite loud.
https://a.pomfe.co/ynwejua.webm
To add, it's on 16.1 when keybinding configuration was implemented. Sorry if you've already fixed this.
This is really good!
Also, DS4Windows can and does have issues with Windows 10. If you're willing to deal with some minor headaches on some systems, the final beta build of SCPToolkit works great with DualShock 4 pads instead. Just make sure you have an official Sony brand one to be safe and a usb cable since I've found that Bluetooth support can be spotty too at times
Quickly checked it out. Interesting game with some minor issues for me.
So hard! I love it! I'm stuck when you get into the ship, it's probably beacuse I have no controller.
Not sure if I'm a bad player or burst lasts too short - can't use it effectively at all. Also - when I broke gates using green ship - bullets still aiming to broken gates.
Took a couple of tries but I cleared it, just barely. Can't seem to shield through the spinning flamethrowers, but who cares. S-ranked first stage, C-ranked second. I played enough shmoop 1 to get the design and rhythm you were going for, and I expect my ass to be properly kicked on the third stage, as per protocol.
>I have no bombs and I must dodge homing flame throwers
Keep up the good work, faggot. Glad you cut back a little on the unholy randomization. Sacrificing points to switch my weapons is annoying, but I'll take it if it means I can get a level 3 laser consistently. Homing and spread are for queers.
Oh man! Somebody who actualy played Shmoop 1!
Most of that game was just practice making games in order to make this one. It shows a little better in the boss fights than the rest of the game,but I generally learned a lot about what works and what doesn't in shmup design from that.
Thanks for playing, and glad to see you stuck with it.
Spread shot is life, shotgun strats all day.
You should remake the stage 3 boss in some way. That one had really fun patterns.
Anyways, here's some feedback after trying to play the bloody thing for score:
I've figured out how to break into a 6X multiplier on both stages so far, could reach upwards of ~230k by the end of stage 2 assuming I can get a perfect run. Might be able to go higher if you can elaborate on how the stage clear bonus is calculated. My score sometimes drops by as much as 10k for reasons I don't really understand.
Outside of all that, I don't have much to complain about. I think having three speeds is redundant since you can just tap-move or focus instead, but seeing that you kept the system from Shmoop 1, you've probably found some practical use for it. I haven't found a reason to go less than top speed. Difficulty is about on par with classic arcade normals, stage and boss designs/patterns are both quite good, I find. It's certainly far from awful, generic, or being pointlessly difficult. Breakables for extra points would make it a hell of a lot better I think (breaking the legs of the stage 1 boss, breaking the shields before the mob during stage 2, maybe blow off the head and legs of the stage 2 boss, etc).
The small change to the burst mechanic makes it a lot better and doesn't feel like half a death anymore. Burst might prompt more use (outside of boss battles specifically) if you can exchange something for the multiplier (such as a special attack, temporary damage boost/level 4 attack, just something in exchange for cancelling [X] amount of bullets or exchanging [X] amount of multiplier to make it a little friendlier for non-scoring players/1CCers), but doing so might require the entire game to be re-balanced or changed entirely. It's certainly better than before, but it's still not quite fun to use. I don't exactly recall how the burst was in the initial demo, I might be imagining the invulnerability time and cancel radius to be increasing with each multiplier. I can't really tell since I'm something of a death-bomber, but it feels like that on higher multipliers. If I'm not imagining it, I'd say it's a good addition. If I am, I'd say it might be a good addition.
That's about it from me. It's good the way it is, but there are a lot of little details you can add where you'd want it or a player might expect it. It's fun enough that I've found myself playing for score at this stage of development. If you can clean up the point values, add a few more break bonuses, and polish the burst mechanic a little more, I'd say you'd hit a gold standard. All that should be left after is the presentation and how all the mechanics come together.
Take care. I look forward to the next demo.
just like my DICK
rood
and btw can you make a level makerfor this game when the game's development is complete?
I'll look into it after the game's done, but no promises. The way the levels are scripted on my end is pretty complicated.
ok.
This game is so hard.
Again, really loved this. Fast, frantic and fun, even if bandicam lowered the framerate to the point of permanent slow-mo.