Thread etiquette question... since I see that a mostly different crowd is around now, would it be acceptable if I reposted something of mine from a few pages and few hours ago?

Yeah, go ahead. Since the thread is so big we get a lot of Thread Hoppers.

Thanks!

So a friend of mine and I have been working on a MLP-ish shoot-em-up game for the past few months, with her handling the programming and half of the spritework and other graphics, and myself working on the other half of the visual art duties. With the game mostly-probably-nearly complete, she's decided to release a demo, which you can find in this post!

http://renaturnip.deviantart.com/#/d5bmxss

Or the direct download here, if you are allergic to deviantArt:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/n2y7h3ufd7366ls/fdademo48.zip

Any and all feedback would be very much appreciated! Please, enjoy.

That's a big Changeling.

Fallout Zebra Soldier.

Demonic Iron Will?

Iron Will can subsist on nothing but the flesh of 14 virgins every 7 years. I'm pretty sure he was already a demon.

This popped up on my G+ feed, cannot unsee...◊

Would Rarity be a Galteid Promethean?

If you need Pony Animated GIFs for any reason... here you go

Too bad gifs tend to take forever to load.

@Registered:

Using shift requires a bit too much finger dexterity to use well. For example, I tried Cadence/Twilight, and it's hard to actually use Twilight because I have to use my left pinky finger to hold down shift while moving with WASD. The alternative would be using my right pinky, which is farther away from its respective shift key, which would murder my hand if I wanted to use manual fire.

In short, I would very much recommend that all the keys be mapped in a way that they're all easily reachable, and preferably with only the pointer, middle, and ring fingers. Or even better, have some options menu where we can map the keys to our own preferences.

Also, this is just me, but I hate manual fire in shoot-em-ups. (I'm looking at you, Touhou POFV.) They murder my hand, and I can only last one game (if that) before I have to rest it.

Why would anyone ever make a Shmup without autofire?

Shmups without autofire tend to have charge shots. Like the example Kyler had: Touhou POFV, each character has a charge "bomb".

@Registered: Okay, got around to playing it. I'm going to second the idea that there needs to be some sort of flashing light or something when you get hit/hit an enemy. It's kinda hard to tell if you're taking damage. Knowing the size of the hitbox would also be good, as would making the shots more visible; in some cases they really don't stand out much against the background. As for the keys, the shift thing didn't bug me too much, but I think it's more intuitive to have the shot keys be something like the J, K, and L rather than J, I, and O. The autofire....I pretty much just used autofire the whole time. If there's going to be a manual shot it needs to have some sort of advantage like a charge shot or something or it isn't worth using.

edited 18th Aug '12 5:56:14 PM by JapaneseTeeth

Ideally you should make the default controls sensible and also give the option to remap them.

Humans: Start getting hungry!

Ponies: Bring your barf bags.

Manual shot actually looks superior to autofire, in this case (assuming you can keep up with hammering the key). Autofire only does heart shots at long intervals (Cadence) or a thin stream of shots (Twilight). Manual fire does a whole barrage of shots at a time.

But still, bloody hand murder.

True, I'm just not sure if it's really worth the trouble in this case. Especially because it's kinda hard to gauge the amount of damage.

Point.

The mooks' shots don't seem to hurt at all. At one point, I just let go of all but the autofire button, tempted to scream "I. AM. BULLETPROOOOOF!!!"

Dredd pony.

Yeesh.

Betrayal.

Fanciest pony.

edited 18th Aug '12 6:36:49 PM by SkyStrike

Well, it was only a matter of time before she lost it...

@Kyler Thatch and Japanense Teeth: Very fair points. It took me a while to get used to the control scheme myself — again, I'm not the programmer here — so I understand and sympathize with the complaints on the controls, the shift key as well. I definitely can see and suspect the final version allowing you to change your control scheme. Thought will be given on the default scheme, as well.

The concerns on player's hitbox and enemy/player bullet visibility have also been acknowledged... "Make everything possible more clear to the player, " is on her list of issues to fix, now that she's been getting feedback on the game.

I'll make a point to let her know that the level of damage the player characters attacks inflict should also be under that umbrella.

To clarify, Twilight and Cadance's manual shots are superior to their auto-shots, as far as damage per second(if you can mash the key properly) and area of effect go... though Cadance's shots are actually meant to be used simultaneously, to compensate for her auto-shots extremely slow firing rate.

In the final version both auto-shots will (or so I've heard) have additional effects on hit, charging up a bomb meter recharge for Twilight, and a health recharge for Cadance. All that being said...

I completely acknowledge that the lack of feedback to the player on how much damage is inflicting is really problematic. As is, Cadance is probably the strongest character in the demo version, with both her shots inflicting much heavier damage than Twilight's [which is its own acknowledged balance problem], but because there's visible way to discern that as is, no one's ever going to realize that. Blame this issue on the myopia that comes from a two-person development, I suppose... revealing these biases to us is half the reason that this demo had to happen.

Oh, and as a parting question, any opinions on how you'd rate the overall difficulty level? With or without the control issues you faced, if at all possible.

Either way, thank you both very much for your time and commentary!

I'll have to get back to you on that. I actually only did a single run-through. XD

Blossomlane.

Hmm... I'd be up for an episode where Rarity has a Lesson Zero level of snappage