Hello!
This is my first ever game. Creating a game has been a childhood dream and I finally did it! I wanted to create this game as a tribute for someone that is very special to me and completing it was a very proud moment.
Pilot Kim is a simple yet challenging shoot'em up/bullet hell where the goal is to beat 10 waves of enemies. Killing enemies rewards the player with some XP that they can use between waves to level up some random stats. Also, every few waves the player gets a new random weapon!
Please if you have any feedback or if you come across some bugs let me know!
I want to credit Lazy Devs tutorials, they helped me create the foundations for the game and also Gruber who is the original creator of the music.
Updated (2023-12-29):
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XP orbs and bullets are more visible when they are moving together
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Power UP names clarified
- High Scores also register when losing
Congratulations!! You've made a game that is playable, complete and challenging! It is far enough away from the LazyDevs shmup tutorial to be its own thing. Well done
Some comments:
- I really struggled with the power-up screen. Sometimes I couldn't select items and didn't know why. Once it seemed like I was stuck on the page and couldn't leave or select anything. I was moving left and right and pressing all the keys and then it suddenly threw me back into the game. This page really needs some explanation or different highlighting.
- When a wave ends its extremely abrupt. I was in the middle of a good shoot-out when suddenly I'm on the select page. How about when the time ends, no more enemies spawn for that wave but the existing ones continue until destroyed or leave the bottom of the screen?
- The player's death noise is a bit on the undramatic side.
However this game rocks once you get to a certain point (about level 6). I had bullets coming out from all sides of my ship and destroying things all around. The enemy also had a ton of bullets coming my way and it was great fun dodging and firing.
I loved the stars and clouds background. Could you not decide if this was in an atmosphere or in space? Doesn't matter - it looks cool.
This is a good game that could become great if the instructions and presentation could be improved. I really hope you continue making PICO-8 games. Well done - Gold starred
Thanks for your input!
The power up screen thing is a bug, i thought I got it solved but clearly not... I will definitely work on the points you mention, this is very good feedback and very helpful :)
Well done. Single minor nitpick during game-play, besides the already mentioned abrupt wave end, is that bullets can be hidden behind XP and move at the exact same speed so they stay hidden. If you want to show both, you could have XP drawn first on odd frames and dangers (ships and bullets) drawn first on even frames, for a retro flicker feel when they occupy the same pixels onscreen.
High scores seem to not work, at least on normal difficulty that is the only one I tried. I'm fine with entering my letters at start of game rather than if I get a high-score, but would like in exchange that the game remembers it for the next game and has it pre-filled but still editable (in case of multiple people playing in turns on the same device) at start of new game.
For better readability, add units to upgrade screen.
XP bonus is more readable as +50% than 0.5
shield is a reconstruction time in seconds maybe ? 12s
crit chance is 5% ? (if so it feels very low)
crit damage is +50%
Not sure what dodge is, invincibility frames timer maybe ? so 5s ?
I am glad you enjoyed it! I uploaded a new version with some of the changes (hopefully I didn't break anything).
High scores worked, but they only registered when winning the game. I realized it's a bit silly, so I also changed it so they will record on losing. I definitely don't have enough tokens to modify much about scores, but I will think about adding them when finishing the game rather than at the start.
I also added units and better descriptions/units to the power ups in general. For example, dodge is a random chance to just flat avoid damage.
Thank you for your feedback!
Little bug with the high scores : just beat my best and all three high scores were replaced with it. In case it might matter, all three previous ones had same name (MMM).
Lost to the final boss : because the timer was getting near zero and me having plenty of lives left, I decided to damage boost to try to kill it before time out, and discovered that you lose all your lives at once without invisibility frames upon collision with it :(
This was fun! Really nice sfx + graphics. Kudos on the first game!
Thanks for the feedback guys! I released a new version that should fix the invulnerability frames.
Great game, well done.
I was in the boss fight on level 10 and it suddenly just said "game over".
Does that mean I won? Or did I lose somehow?
I had the shield up, and I don't think I collided with anything at the time.
Thanks! Did you see if you had some time left? You need to kill the boss in time or you lose. I may need to tweak this time, in case it is not enough to kill it
I just got to the boss for the first time. With about 10 seconds remaining it started flashing. Does this indicate half health? A quarter? A tenth? Whatever, I got the game over. This was on the easy difficulty.
I had my shield upgraded to the point that it regenerated every 2 seconds, so I didn't really bother to dodge, I just kept lined up with the boss pouring damage in. So I'm not sure how I'm supposed to be any faster here.
Win or lose, are there enough tokens left to display our final upgrade state on the game over screen? I'd like to compare what I had here with other players, especially the ones who manage to win this fight.
That is a great idea, I think there aren't enough, but I am want to clean up everything a bit, or even add a second cart for main menu/upgrades.
I see, you went full dodge, maybe you didn't have enough damage then ;)
First, congrats on making a game! That's awesome!
I am terrible at shmups., so I only lasted a few rounds, but I liked the upgrade system and found it really fun. I may try it again soon on easy so I can see more of it.
Pilot Kim is an impressive game, and it's mostly fun. But it does have some issues.
First, there was this.
Second, the boss. I've now reached it several times. I have never defeated it, even playing on Easy. Has anyone?
Am I choosing better upgrades? The game doesn't provide enough feedback. Am I learning to aim better? The game doesn't provide enough feedback. Is it bugged and I'm doing no damage at all? Could be, there's no way to tell.
There's a basic fix here: give the boss a health bar, so we can at least tell how close we're getting. But there are some deeper game design issues at stake.
- As designer, having worked on the regular waves for a weeks or months, you may think we players want something different and hard. But we only experience the regular waves for a few minutes. If we play it long enough to get to the boss, you can assume we're having fun with the regular waves! Yes, shmup players expect a boss. But it doesn't need to be a sudden roadblock to finishing the game.
- Old school shmup design, you get a few lives to practice against the boss with before starting over. New school shmup design, there may be a checkpoint before the boss with unlimited lives. In both cases the boss can be quite hard. But at the moment Pilot Kim has no way to practice against the boss, so we have to play through all the other waves each time. Under these rules the boss should not be the hardest thing in the game. (You can give a score bonus for defeating it quickly, so there are ways to defeat it better.)
- Ideally, an upgrade system like this should reward trying out different builds. But the boss design means all that matters in the end is maximum damage and rate of fire.
The sounds very harsh. But please believe me, I've had a lot of fun playing Pilot Kim! I've got quite good at dodging around shots to grab experience orbs, and it's really satisfying to do! I'd just like to see the end be as fun as the rest of it.
If you need some additional tokens, would you consider removing the screen where you enter initials, and just list the high scores by number? You probably spent quite a bit of time making the interface work, and it's a fun throwback to classic machines. But most PICO-8 games do without, even if they track high scores.
Regardless of what you do with Pilot Kim, I hope the experience inspires you to go on making games.
Hey! First of all thanks for the feedback and I am glad that you liked the game. Since this is my first game, it is easy to get lost working/obsessing on some stuff while forgetting some basic things. I am working on splitting the game on two carts, one for the main menu and another for the game, this should help with the number of tokens.
I loved the health bar idea, i will for sure implement it. It will also help me tweak the health to make sure it is not impossible to kill.
I had some other ideas for the game but i wan out of space way sooner than expected. My plans were to be able to choose amongst few weapons, not to get them random and have at least a couple more bosses to have different experiences every time. I will see what I can do with the tokens that I have!
@Randsak : Thank you.
Here's an upgrade state I reached on a run where I got a number of lucky ×2 and ×3 rate of fire and damage upgrades. On previous runs I took several HP upgrades to survive the longer waves, but this time I decided I had got good enough at dodging to get by without.
My end of game score was the highest I've seen be quite a margin, but I still got timed out by the boss.
"I had some other ideas for the game but i wan out of space way sooner than expected. My plans were to be able to choose amongst few weapons, not to get them random and have at least a couple more bosses to have different experiences every time. I will see what I can do with the tokens that I have!"
I'd sort of like to see choice of weapons, but the current mechanics mean that all that really matters is maximising damage immediately in front of the player, because it's all about grabbing the XP. If you want to have some weapon choice and make it meaningful, some thoughts:
- Have some enemies move through the screen from the sides or back, making shooting sideways more useful.
- Have the sideways shots do more damage than any other shot type - so destroying enemies with them is feasible, the question is whether I can grab their XP before it falls off the screen.
- Have some shots that do less damage but block the enemy shots.
- Have a lot more variation in the speed of shots, with some slow moving high damage, and some high speed low damage.
While there are many of changes you could make here, Pilot Kim is a mostly fun game that doesn't need a huge amount changed to make it really fun. The important thing is, in the places you offer a choice, the outcomes need to be interesting ones...
Hey @Cowirrie, so it turns out you are right, the boss has an insane amount of health... I guess that the times I killed it was before I corrected a bug related to critical damage.
I already have the game split in two carts and thankfully I have around 1500 tokens to play with. I reduced a lot the boss health and removed the boss timer, it does not achieve anything actually. I like how the health bar looks on boss and actually even on regular enemies, this may help understanding how the build is performing.
And, speaking of builds, build is the next big thing I want to focus. Some ideas that I have:
- Add passive powers/weapons that would trigger for example on a shield explosion
- Add some more weapons or diversify the current weapons
- Chose weapons/powers
- Cap the values of powers
- Overhaul the rarity of powers, rarity should give rarer powers, not better versions of existing ones
I hope I can add these things!
Cheers! And again thanks for playing the game :)
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