You know, in the Old Days, games were hard in order to siphon quarters from you. This appears to be hard solely to siphon my will to live.
Alright, one more try...
Seriously though, as far as constructive feedback goes: the final boss had too many sweetspots: areas where you could sit and avoid all fire without moving while firing back. I'd suggest making the enemy projectiles less numerous, but more demanding. Kill the sweetspots and reward movement, rather than punish it.
I agree with the abov post, but would like to add a solution to criticism:
Go back to a genre-defining game like the original Raiden or Ikaruga and actually sit down and play through and take notes on every enemy, attack and boss pattern and write what you like and dislike and of course the why.
I'm not saying copy them outright, just give yourself as a designer a better idea of the thought that went into these games originally.
On a side note, it's amazing what people are using HTML5 for these days!
Thanks for feedback on Construct 2, we've come a long way since that interview though!
I agree that games coming out now for HTML5 are still fundamentally quite simple, but every now and then one comes along that just pushes things a little further on like this one in my opinion.
It's only a matter of time before we see more sophisticated games, and I for one can't wait!
Looks nice. I was excited to give it a try. I'm on my company laptop, however, and the screen is only 768 tall. I had no way to view the entire environment which made the game quite challenging.
This is a big feature request, but honestly window sizing/scaling is something you want to handle early rather than late.
Or, you may just want to throw an error page up if people don't have large enough resolution capabilities.
I actually found a spot just off-center almost at the bottom of the screen where you can't get hit by any of the boss shot patterns. Finding it almost instantaneously, I just realized I play way too many bullet hell shmups.
Yeah I did the same and it quickly became very boring as I just held down the x button. This issue is largely due to the bounding box set on the sprite being far too small. As long as you avoid a bullet through the center of the sprite, it doesn't register as a collision... There will need to be some tuning as well as without the safe zone, it would take far too long to defeat the boss. All in all though, pretty decent considering it was made using construct 2...
Can you suggest some of the old coin-ops of the same genre? I remember having lots of fun with many but can't, for the life of me, remember any of their names. All that comes to mind is Ikaruga, but that was on the GameCube or whatnot.
Yeah, Ikaruga was a classic. For very traditional "bullet hell" stuff, I recommend you start with the Touhou Project (a million games, all of them are essentially the same thing). I've also been playing a lot of Jamestown lately. Unfortunately, I'm running on very little sleep and nothing is else to coming to mind, but definitely check those out.
Ah, thank you. I'm not looking so much for bullet hell stuff, there were less bullets than this, but I remember ground vehicles you could destroy, nice graphics (maybe on the Neo Geo?), powerups, things like that. It was a military installation-themed thing...
I was about to ask this question. I also can't figure out if the powerups stack or if they're distinct. I wonder if it's possible to win if you get all of the powerups without dying.
Yeah, the blue laser feels more powerful than the third wide powerup.. but there's a point with the boss where the only place you can be without any chance of getting hit is off to the side, so I bet the third powerup is good for that. (If you don't hit the boss, it doesn't change firing pattern.)
Ah, I just won. Pretty sure the trick is indeed to not die while collecting powerups, and then not die while fighting the boss; I didn't lose any lives. I had to use all three bombs on the boss, there seem to be three places where there's no way to avoid a hit without the bomb.
I always sucked at bullet hell games, but this one definitely looks good. Only uses 50% of a CPU, and runs very smoothly on my machine (Arch64/Chrome).
Development time. Flash has a broader range of libraries and tools to accomplish this much faster than in html5. Also, the game doesn't run on my iPhone because it can't support sending key-presses, it's stuck on the intro screen. The clouds that are being animated are moving a 10th of the speed compared to the desktop version.
My question is, by the time that smart phones become fast enough to run stable versions of these html5 games, won't they also be able to handle flash games with relative ease as well?
A more interesting question is HTML5 penetration in your target market - rather than general usage, it would be interesting to look at the analytics from an established Flash Gaming site.
Stats from igre123.net (flash gaming site) we run: about 1.5m uniques/month: chrome: 38%, firefox (mostly v8&v9) 37%, IE 20% (v8 62%, v9 23%, v7 9% & v6 4%). So >80% HTML5. I can't find data for flash it the new analytics. But last time I checked (when I was stil able to) it was high, almost 100%.
In the very short term, there are few advantages of Flash over HTML5/WebGL.
In the medium to long term, HTML5/WebGL becomes a much more attractive prospect. Desktops are mostly covered already. Most mobile phones browsers should support WebGL in the near future (FF mobile already does). Plus any connected TV with a browser will support it. Suddenly your installed base looks a lot more healthy.
The thing to remember about the quality of the games you are seeing is that games take a quite a long time to make (6-24+ months) and this technology has only been mature enough to use for around 6 months. We're really at the very beginning of the road for WebGL games.
Also, this game is created in Construct 2 which advertises itself as a 'no programming required' game making tool. It's not surprising that the games are simple if it is entirely general purpose code.
3 (sic, three) FPS here-- Linux Mint 12 amd64, Firefox 9.0.1, nvidia Go 7300 with 512MB RAM and 4GB system RAM. Also only about 60% of the frame is visible at a time on my 1280x800 display.
webgl.disabled is false by default. I switched the force-enabled on but it dodn't make any noticeable difference.
I should have mentioned I'm using the nouveau driver. I get slightly better performance with the proprietary nvidia driver. In my experience most games will either work about as well with nouveau or not at all.
GLX gears is a pretty unreliable benchmark: I've gotten anywhere from 300 to 600 FPS on this machine at different times. I usually get around 90 FPS when playing fairly recent games like Modern Warfare 2 (on windows). Perhaps you meant glxinfo, which reports whether direct rendering is enabled (and it is).
Alright, one more try...
Seriously though, as far as constructive feedback goes: the final boss had too many sweetspots: areas where you could sit and avoid all fire without moving while firing back. I'd suggest making the enemy projectiles less numerous, but more demanding. Kill the sweetspots and reward movement, rather than punish it.