A River Raid heavily inspired game.
Shot on enemies and avoid hitting the ground on this classic inspiring gameplay.
Run for your highscore at an infinity loop map.
Controls:
-Left and right to move the airplane;
-(X) to shot.
This is my first Pico-8 cartridge. I'm open to suggestions! =)
Update 0.1.1:
- Tinny gradual turning;
- Change sprite at turning;
- Bullet hitbox more accurate;
- Player hitbox adjusted;
- Mobs hitbox adjusted;
- Added window at game over screen;
- Better distribution of the bottom bar;
- Show highscore at the bottom bar;
- Some minor bug fixes;
- (yet with just one life).
Needs more than one life I call tell you, @guscosta. Also if you are holding down the fire button and die the game starts over with score of 0 and you don't know what your last scorer is.
This is fun, and I'm interested to see where you go next. However, I agree with @dw817 that multiple lives or hit points would be nice, especially given the fairly large hitbox. I got to the final bridge before it loops about 10 times and died there, then played through the entire area again and again, before I finally found what lay beyond that point.
A few specific suggestions:
- See how it feels if you make it so holding down a direction accelerates over a few frames, so tapping a key just moves by 1 pixel, but holding it down moves more pixels, up to the maximum speed. This is common for shmups, although I don't think the original River Raid did this, so you might prefer to keep it that way for the classic feel.
- Graphics don't have to be fancy, but do everything you can to feel responsive to the player. In the case of a shmup, draw versions of the player plane sprite tilting left and right, and use them when the player is moving.
- When the map loops, it makes sense for all enemies to respawn, or there would be no challenge. But could you make it so any fuel depots the player destroyed stay destroyed, so fuel becomes more of a problem if they keep going? Or even make it so drained depots get destroyed too, setting an upper limit to how long the player could survive? This would also encourage taking different branches on successive loops through the map.
- I like that the slow rate of fire requires thought and planning on the player's part, and the opposition is scaled to match. It's a balanced game. But I don't think it should have the "bullethell" tag. That's a different style of shmup, with different design goals.
- There's something quite threatening about how the helicopters start out stationary and than move when you get closer to them. That's neat.
Oh yes I remember the original game, nice work 👌
I think I've reached the second round of the whole map:
Feedback:
I'd tweak collisions (assuming you've used hitboxes as it appears) especially:
- your bullets vs static ships (if you visually hit the left side of the ship, it doesn't hit)
- your plane vs static ships (it looks you crash on them far earlier than a visual contact)
About your plane control, I think it would be great to make it slightly "less reactive" on small adjustments. Maybe less linearly, add some sort of smooth acceleration? Like small correction moves it only 1px and gain speed as you keep pressing on one side. Edit: duh I should have read @Cowirrie 's comment above before posting, they already gave the same suggestion, but good to know we had the same impression and view on that.
Hey Guys!
thank you very much for the feedback @dw817, @Cowirrie, and @Heracleum (that's a great highscore, btw!).
I pretend to work on the project next week to refine the gameplay. Y'all made excellent suggestions! =)
News on next week! See ya!
[Please log in to post a comment]
