SchmupDemo

Controls:
WASD - Movement
Spacebar - Shoot (hold spacebar to charge the laser)
Shift - I-frame roll (consumes fuel)
R - Reload Early (laser does not need to reload. The machine gun and missiles will reload if you attempt to shoot while they're empty)
Esc - Pause

Rules:
Kill ships to rack up points. The points from each kill are multiplied by your current graze counter. Your graze counter increases when you get close to an enemy or their bullets/explosions. I stole this feature from a schmup called "Psyvarian" where you "buzz" an enemy projectile by getting close, but not actually colliding with it.  Your ship dies if you get hit 5 times or you run out of fuel. Fuel is constantly draining. Each graze will refill you a bit, but there are refill stations spawning as the map moves (the grey octagonal platforms). 

Background:

This is a Schmup (Shoot'em up) demo. The sounds are buggy and I should redo them all with a global audiobus. This project started as my attempt at recreating the atari game "River Raid" as apart of the 20 games challenge. The scope quickly blew up as I got more interested. I'd like to get feedback on the hitboxes, guns and ship movement before making a final game. The final game will include more advanced enemy movement, bullets, vehicles and placement. Additionally, an actual fleshed out level with a boss. 

UPDATE: 

Added a boss, more enemies, enemy movement patterns and enemy bullets. Added powerups. Changed the i-frame dash to an aileron roll. Game is finished. Moving onto my next project. 

Lessons Learned:

1. Plan out the project scope better to take advantage of inheritance and oop. The boss uses way too many unique nodes and became annoying to update. I made a basic gun node and extended it for the missile launcher, machine gun and laser gun. However, I made unique nodes (idk why, poor planning of the scope?) for the enemy shooting. In hindsight, every single shooting entity in the game could pull from the same gun library. 

2. Test the audio player as a global variable. Use an audio bus. I used a single audio player for each sound and repeated a lot for nodes. I want to try using a global audio bus so everything references the same audio node. Also, this prevents issues like sound cutting off when a node is freed

3.  After playing some schmups, I found that most had a very narrow screen. They put art or HUD elements on the side. It doesn't feel great to have to move across the screen to grab a power up, charge the ship or kill an enemy. If i increased the speed, it became too difficult to dodge bullets. Therefore, I think I should've decreased the screen play area width. 

4. I had a lot of fun making a reactive ammo ui for each gun. However, having to reload in a schmup feels awful. Its slightly better with the graze system because you're forced to focus only on dodging while reloading. Additionally, the player's eyes are focused on dodging all the bullets on the screen. They never have a second to focus on the UI. The crappy reloading mechanic ensures the player will try to conserve ammo.  I will reuse the principles of the animated ui for future projects, but modify it for any schmup related projects. 

5. None of my enemies telegraph the attack (besides the boss). Bullets just appear next to them and fly out. I'm used to the patterns due to playtesting, but I predict players will find this frustrating. Future projects MUST include telegraph animation frames (and maybe sounds) before an enemy does something that can harm the player. 

Most sprite assets were pulled from this artist: https://www.instagram.com/rayslynyrd

boss was pulled from STRIKERS.

I modified a few, but not enough to call it my own work.