Vertical shooter - as of yet unnamed

[Plu]

This is a little project I started working on this weekend to take a break from my bigger project, because I wanted something easier to relax a bit.
I took some inspiration from Raptor: Call of the Shadows (and stole their fighter yet)

Yes, I know, my art skills suck balls. Deal with it I'll get someone to draw art when I get closer to an actual game.

Also, the rocket pods came out pretty cool.

Controls:

wsad or arrows: move around
spacebar: blow stuff up with the machine gun
x: unload large amounts of rockets (superweapon, but near unlimited ammo for the test)

Goal:

Kill stuff. Collect points. Don't die. When enemies die, they leave behind powerups (yellow is extra points, red is healing) which you can grab.

Known issues:

There is no sound. The game does not stop when you die, nor does it stop when you reach the end of the level.

Parts of the codebase are still very sloppy, as I only clean them up when it gets annoying to work with/expand on.
But feel free to steal anything from it that catches your fancy. (If you steal my artwork I will laugh at you, but you can steal that as well.)

Let me know if you find any issues, criticism, encouraging advice, or anything else.
Bonus cookies if you make your own level. It's loaded from the text file in the levels folder, and uses numbers to determine which enemy to create, spaces to determine where on the screen they appear and enters to see how far into the level they come up. Double bonus cookies if your level is better than mine

[raidho36]

It's called "scroll shooter".

So OK, first off it's hard to control it due to that inertia thing. And I was expected to control it with a mouse anyway. Second, it's hard to kill anyone because any enemy takes several hits and you'd have to aim and dodge, which is hard due to that inerta thing. Then gun projectile speed was OK, but it was bursting bullets too thick, same with the missiles. Or it was only the missiles and bullets weren't fast enough? I can't really tell.

I suggest enemies to be less tough but to have more of them. At least have few of the grunts and many of the weaklings. Also there should be more enemy projectiles on the screen so you'd have to dodge intensively.

My favorite scroll shooter game is Parsec47.I don't know for whatever reason, because it has defeating weak enemies too easy and defeating all others very hard and it has no mouse control. I guess it was the amount of projectiles on the screen that you'd have to dodge. Another very good scroll shooter game I like is Jets'n'Guns, mostly for it's ballanced enemy waves coming at you. But it's sometimes hard to see enemy projectiles and you will getting hit all the time anyway, so surviving doesn't involves much dodging skill but rather skill to spam your bullets in right place to kill your enemies before they shoot.

[seanmd]

I really like the explosions on the enemies as they're hit with your bullets, and that the enemies smoke if they're near death.

I think the controls feel a bit floaty. Perhaps set a max speed?

also, when I died I got

6YX9KrD.png (22.01 KiB) Viewed 256 times

and last but not least:

It's called "scroll shooter".

you're both right.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoot_'em_up

edit: holy shit, those rockets are badass.

[szensk]

Yeah, the rockets are quite cool!

[Plu]

Hm, gonna look into that crash. Thanks for reporting.

There is a max speed, but I think it's too high right now. And the friction is probably still too low if everyone's having problems controlling the ship, so that'll have to go up a bit further.

Also, this game is inspired by Raptor, not bullet hell shooters, so the enemies are a bit tougher and the bullets a bit fewer than in those games. There'll be larger numbers of enemies later on but I don't want the whole game's focus to be on dodging things while enemies randomly explode all around you. So they needed a little toughness so that you'd actually have to focus on killing them.