Raidaa no Asahi

[papillon]

Wrote this ages ago, so I can only hope it makes sense... and it is NOT robust, you can break it by feeding it nonsense text

Code: Select all

draw_set_font(myfont);
lbcounter = 1;
checkingtext = "";
while(lbcounter < string_length(alltext))
{
current_char = string_char_at(alltext,lbcounter);
checkingtext += current_char;
if (string_width(checkingtext) > maximum_text_width)
{
alltext = string_delete(alltext,whitespot,1);
alltext = string_insert("#",alltext,whitespot);
checkingtext = string_copy(alltext,whitespot,lbcounter-whitespot+1);
}

if (current_char = ' ') whitespot = lbcounter;
lbcounter += 1;

}

where alltext starts out as the long string with no linebreaks in it and maximum_text_width is the pixel-width you would be using for draw_text_ext. this goes through the line looking for whitespaces that can be used to insert a linebreak - so when the text it's checking is too long for a line, it backs up to the nearest whitespace and puts a linebreak there. After this is run, alltext should contain the original string but with #'s stuck in at the right spots.

[sake-bento]

I have been looking forward to this! I just finished the first episode, and I am interested to know what is to come (although I think I shall wait for 1.0 before moving on). The girls are very, very cute and I'm quite fond of Ikkari (I've always liked the quiet cool girl type). I'm not a huge Asaga fan, though. I've never been a fan of the gropey gropey scenes, and girls who manipulate guys like that tend to annoy me. I'll be cheering for Ikkari for sure. XD It would also be nice to see what Kaito looks like. The fact that I only sorta have an idea of how old he is worries me (this may be corrected in future episodes, but I wouldn't know since I haven't played them ^_^;; )

I played in VN mode because I fail like crazy at top-down shooters. I kinda feel as if this would be better marketed as a top-down shooter that also has a plot presented in a VN format. At least for me, the battles seemed to take awhile. Then again, battles always take awhile for me in fighting games. I'm...not so good at them. ^_^;;

I really liked the music and SFX. The music fit the scenes well, and the SFX sounded really good. Using a mouse to advance things was no problem for me. I use a laptop, so the mouse button is conveniently located in the middle right where my thumb is. Backgrounds were nicely done, and the girls have cute designs. I can't comment too much on the plot since I've only done episode one. I shall leave more comments as I progress. Ah, and the "Extras" button doesn't seem to take me anywhere. Was I supposed to unlock something to get extras?

[Jake]

Hmm. I have mixed feelings.
(I also wrote all this hours ago then got distracted by an annoying OpenGL implementation thing, so apologies if I'm re-treading old ground.)

The story is shaping up to be proper all-out visible-lasers fantasy-space-opera, which is a great starting point. The characters are pretty fun (although I could happily murder Asaga and not feel that guilty), and along with the music (mostly pretty appropriate) lend a great anime-esque air. (Although music transitions are a bit sudden - a bit of crossfade wouldn't go amiss.)

(To answer mikey's earlier question - it's pretty similar to Starlight, really; like the pilot episode of a TV series that funding isn't secured for yet. The scene is set for a larger story, but there's also a smaller story which starts and ends within that three-episode download.)

The shooter segments, though, I didn't really get on with. There are several things I think could be improved. I'm only being picky 'cause I'm such a big shooter fan...:

- I would say that most of the battles are about twice as long as they need to be - especially for the first few episodes in an ongoing series. I nearly gave up on the Machiavelli just 'cause it was taking too long. :/ Endurance fights are, to my mind, no fun - they're harder not because you need a different skill, but because you need to play /perfectly/ to avoid attrition wiping you out in the long run.

- As far as I can tell, the only difference between 'easy' and 'bullet hell' and all the stages in between is how much damage is dealt by hits. So someone playing on easy still has to evade the same bullet patterns, they just get penalised a bit less for being hit. At the very least, I'd recommend not having the one-hit-loses-you-your-charge rule for VN and maybe Easy difficulty; I'd also suggest making the patterns easier or at least slower for the easier difficulty settings, if not sparser, particularly since...

- Bullets are often incredibly hard to dodge. I say this from the point of view of a seasoned Touhou player... some of the individual patterns are easy, like the first one on the Machiavelli; others - like the later short-streams-of-red-bullets on the same boss - are so hard (unless I'm missing something fundamental) that it's near-impossible to evade them long enough to charge up all three ships. This is mostly a bullet-pattern-design thing, I guess, but it doesn't help that...

- I have little idea of where the hitbox for the ship is. It seems that some of the wings aren't vulnerable, but some of the empty space around the front is - AABB collisions? This makes it particularly hard to navigate it through tight gaps, though... (At first I had trouble 'cause it took a while for it to sink in that the other two ships weren't damagable while they were switched out...)

- I found it very hard to deal with the fact that after you lose a ship, you can only rotate your ship selection in one direction - with three I can rotate the ships around in a loop continuously, I was expecting to be able to do so with only two, and found it very distracting that I couldn't. :/

- Why limit the player to a very short area in the regular combat stages? It made dodging the missiles, for example, more difficult than it had to be... but more to the point, it made it more difficult for an apparently completely arbitrary reason. Thus, it felt rather annoying - I wasn't getting hit 'cause I wasn't good enough at dodging, I was getting hit 'cause I'd come up against an invisible wall in space which shouldn't really be there which prevented me moving upward enough.



I like the idea of the charge special attack, and it's mostly implemented pretty well. The loss of the charge gauge when you get hit is a nice mechanic, although after a while it did mostly result in me switching to the blue ship for the dodging sections then back to the other two for releasing charge attacks. The only problem was that later patterns tend to have very hard-to-dodge sections, not to mention the up-close-homing-missile-during-your-own-turn attack, so it's often frustrating getting the charges off.

The turn-based system is... odd. It's a bit frustrating at times - like when I've just failed to release a special attack by a couple of frames and then been hit, losing the gauge - but it's an interesting way of giving a 'dogfighting' feel without having the player actually have to go through all the twisting and turning and without having to accomodate rotation or anything. I'm certainly not put off by it!

[Samu-kun]

Version 1.0 has been released!

CHANGES
-Spelling fixes
-You can use either the left mouse button or the space bar to scroll through the text
-Finishing episodes 2 and 3 now returns you to the main menu
-Some gameplay adjustments have been made to the gameplay segments - now they last a bit shorter and the difficulty has also been reduced by a bit
-Save system is now operational
-You can now pause the gameplay segments by pressing the shift key

DOWNLOAD (also works on the first post)

[Samu-kun]

Wrote this ages ago, so I can only hope it makes sense... and it is NOT robust, you can break it by feeding it nonsense text

Code: Select all

draw_set_font(myfont);
lbcounter = 1;
checkingtext = "";
while(lbcounter < string_length(alltext))
{
current_char = string_char_at(alltext,lbcounter);
checkingtext += current_char;
if (string_width(checkingtext) > maximum_text_width)
{
alltext = string_delete(alltext,whitespot,1);
alltext = string_insert("#",alltext,whitespot);
checkingtext = string_copy(alltext,whitespot,lbcounter-whitespot+1);
}

if (current_char = ' ') whitespot = lbcounter;
lbcounter += 1;

}

where alltext starts out as the long string with no linebreaks in it and maximum_text_width is the pixel-width you would be using for draw_text_ext. this goes through the line looking for whitespaces that can be used to insert a linebreak - so when the text it's checking is too long for a line, it backs up to the nearest whitespace and puts a linebreak there. After this is run, alltext should contain the original string but with #'s stuck in at the right spots.

Whooo, thanks for the goody. ^_^ I'll try to make sense out of it and implement it in the new engine. ^_^

The story is shaping up to be proper all-out visible-lasers fantasy-space-opera, which is a great starting point. The characters are pretty fun (although I could happily murder Asaga and not feel that guilty), and along with the music (mostly pretty appropriate) lend a great anime-esque air. (Although music transitions are a bit sudden - a bit of crossfade wouldn't go amiss.)

Ahhh... No killing Asaga! o_o; She's actually a very nice person once you get to know her. Or atleast I think... But I guess that's probably one of the advantages of a branching storyline over a kinetic one... If you don't like a character, then you don't have to follow her story. (Also something that I will consider when rewriting everything)

Unfortunately, I can't do anything about the crossfade... GM only officially supports .wav and .midi music. The things you can do with a .mp3 or a .wma in GM are really, really limited (pretty much just play them). I don't really want to use .midi, and I am never going to even think about using .wav, so we're stuck with the music popping in and out for now. -_-;

- I would say that most of the battles are about twice as long as they need to be - especially for the first few episodes in an ongoing series. I nearly gave up on the Machiavelli just 'cause it was taking too long. :/ Endurance fights are, to my mind, no fun - they're harder not because you need a different skill, but because you need to play /perfectly/ to avoid attrition wiping you out in the long run.

Mmm... Hopefully v1.0 is a small improvement in this regard. But it's probably too late to change anything drastic about the gameplay at this point. It's probably not even worth it since the engine's going to be rebuilt soon anyways.

- As far as I can tell, the only difference between 'easy' and 'bullet hell' and all the stages in between is how much damage is dealt by hits. So someone playing on easy still has to evade the same bullet patterns, they just get penalised a bit less for being hit. At the very least, I'd recommend not having the one-hit-loses-you-your-charge rule for VN and maybe Easy difficulty; I'd also suggest making the patterns easier or at least slower for the easier difficulty settings, if not sparser, particularly since...

Eh-heh... Different bullet patterns for each difficulty would have set the release date for this way too far. It was thought of in the back of my head, but instantly disgarded since it would have been too much content to add.

- Bullets are often incredibly hard to dodge. I say this from the point of view of a seasoned Touhou player... some of the individual patterns are easy, like the first one on the Machiavelli; others - like the later short-streams-of-red-bullets on the same boss - are so hard (unless I'm missing something fundamental) that it's near-impossible to evade them long enough to charge up all three ships. This is mostly a bullet-pattern-design thing, I guess, but it doesn't help that...

Yeah the bullets are harder to dodge, that's why the game punishes you far less than a typical SHMUP for getting hit. Instead of instantly dying, you just have to recharge your secondary attack gauge. Mm... Also, the trick with the stream of red lasers during the Machiavelli battle is that every 6 shots (I think... Or was it 9?) there's a brief pause in the stream. You have to be roughly south of the Machiavelli when this happens and then fly through the crack in the wall of lasers. Being directly east or west of the Machiavelli when this happens takes this opportunity away, since the twin stream of lasers overlaps and walls you in. So the trick is to just not let the lasers push you to the side of the room. Try to stay near the bottom.

- I have little idea of where the hitbox for the ship is. It seems that some of the wings aren't vulnerable, but some of the empty space around the front is - AABB collisions? This makes it particularly hard to navigate it through tight gaps, though... (At first I had trouble 'cause it took a while for it to sink in that the other two ships weren't damagable while they were switched out..

It's a small box at the center of the ship. Mmm... In v1.0, I made the hitbox a bit smaller than it was in v0.9. I'm not sure if it made a huge difference though.

- Why limit the player to a very short area in the regular combat stages? It made dodging the missiles, for example, more difficult than it had to be... but more to the point, it made it more difficult for an apparently completely arbitrary reason. Thus, it felt rather annoying - I wasn't getting hit 'cause I wasn't good enough at dodging, I was getting hit 'cause I'd come up against an invisible wall in space which shouldn't really be there which prevented me moving upward enough.

Mmm... The area is limited since it wouldn't make sense for you to be able to fly ahead of the enemies while you were tagging them. The missiles are kind of undodgeable. The trick with the missiles isn't that you're supposed to dodge them, it's that you're supposed to destroy them before they reach you. So more than anything, you're supposed to face them head on and quickly destroy them. When the lockon appears around your ships, switch over to Asaga (blue) and use her to destroy the missiles before they reach you. That's pretty much what her spread is there for. Ikkari and Chigara probably won't be able to shoot all of them down. (If it's a dicy situation, you can also use a special attack to instantly destroy all the missiles)

[Hyperguy]

And mirrored:

http://www.hyperguy.net/downloads/raida ... on_1.0.zip

[sake-bento]

A'ight. Playing episode 02 of 1.0. Here are some slightly edited stream of consciousness type things.

Mmm...backstory. I like backstory. There are lots of acronyms, but I'm keeping up.

I really don't like Asaga. ::frown:: She reminds me of Suzumiya Haruhi, and I am not a follower of Haruhism. I'm still an Ikkari fan. I like cool girls. I think I just recognized Chigara's outfit. Uguu. The track in the apartment reminds me of a track from My HiME. Ohhh, Ikkari is a rather violent woman. Tsundere? Once again, I do have a dislike for Asaga. It's probably just a personal preference, but yeah. Hmmm...Is that a IkkarixChigara sort of scene?

[Jake]

As it goes, I did notice the gap with the red streams, and did get through it several times - but the fact that the gap you were moving through was moving at right angles to your own motion made that segment of the fight much harder than the following ones, which didn't feel right. I think I only managed to get two ships charged at the same time once on that pattern, meaning it also lasted about as long as the rest of the fight put together. :/

Mmm... In v1.0, I made the hitbox a bit smaller than it was in v0.9. I'm not sure if it made a huge difference though.

Well, it was noticable.

Mmm... The area is limited since it wouldn't make sense for you to be able to fly ahead of the enemies while you were tagging them.

Well, arguably if the player does fly that far up the screen, it's their own fault that their bullets aren't hitting anything...

Personally, I'd rather have the freedom, but I don't know whether that's going to be the same for someone who hasn't spent hours practicing dodging in various shooters...

The missiles are kind of undodgeable. The trick with the missiles isn't that you're supposed to dodge them, it's that you're supposed to destroy them before they reach you.

Yeah, I did get this. The problem is that they would be dodgeable, if there wasn't a big invisible wall about twenty centimetres in front of your ship. So my instinct is to run along the floor of the arena and lead them to one side, then hop up over and past them. It's just that 'up' isn't far enough up to get past them all.

When the lockon appears around your ships, switch over to Asaga (blue)

This was another thing I meant to mention, actually - I found the switching between ships a little confusing at times. As in, I was never intuitively sure which of the two ships I'd switch to when I hit which button. When doing the dual attacks I'd have to use the time the first attack gave me to make sure I knew which button to hit to get the second! I think I'd personally have far preferred to have Z, X and C select each of the ships, so (e.g.) every time I hit 'X' I get the blue ship in lead, rather than cycling through them. That's probably just something to get used to, though... and leaving aside controllability, the rotation is kind of an appealing notion.

(If it's a dicy situation, you can also use a special attack to instantly destroy all the missiles)

The whole reason I was trying to avoid the missiles was so I kept my special attack gauge so I could kill the enemy quicker!



Anyway, I don't mean to sound totally negative - it's a promising concept, and I like the setting. I'm looking forward to seeing what your engine rebuild brings!

[papillon]

The 'rotation' switch-between-ships made perfect sense to me once it clicked for my brain that I was turning THIS way with this key and THAT way with that key... there were many things I had trouble with, but that wasn't one of them.

As for music, there are a couple of dlls available which I've taken to using so that I can run oggs and do fadein/fadeout.... supersound only works properly in GM6 though (which is why FH is still actually a GM6 game, just converted to run on Vista). Can be slightly tricky to get set up and I still have the occasional bug.

[Jake]

The 'rotation' switch-between-ships made perfect sense to me once it clicked for my brain that I was turning THIS way with this key and THAT way with that key... there were many things I had trouble with, but that wasn't one of them.

For me, I think it was as much a problem with where I was looking; I could understand that each button rotated in a different direction, but my point-of-focus was half-way up the screen ahead of the middle ship, most of the time. You know how human vision has a relatively small circle in the centre which is properly focussed, and everything outside of that is seen in much lower definition? Well, I'll habitually keep the player-avatar in a vertical shooter right at the bottom of that circle of focus (which probably has a far better name) in order to better examine the bullet patterns coming towards me... meaning that in this case, the two other ships were in peripheral vision and I couldn't readily tell which was which without glancing down at them. So I'd have to either memorise the order as well as which ship was what type, or move my focal point.

[musical74]

you got this done? WOOOOOOHOOOOOO

I'll download it later this weekend and give you a full report on what I liked and didn't care for!

[sake-bento]

Aaand I'm finished with episode 03! Looks like a great setup for another space adventure harem. I feel so bad for Kaito, though. Really, his position is less than enviable. -_- It was nice to learn more about the histories of the girls, though.

The fight at the beginning of episode 03 seemed a lot more bearable to me. It was also really cool to keep seeing new weapons and stuff. Definitely a nice top-down shooter (even though I played in VN mode because I'm terrible at top-downs XD). I think I heard another Yuki Kajiura track in there with some haunting violin parts. The music actually fit really well, I was quite pleased. Looks like Asaga's story is such that I might have to give her a little more of a chance. She really is a little too eager for ecchi things, though. O_o

Congratulations on completion. ::thumbs up::

[Kikered]

Congrats on the release! I couldn't resist downloading it while in class, and it definitely made the morning go by a lot faster. ^^;

Overall, everything was cute and fun! I liked the expressions on each of the girls, and they definitely made the comedic moments funnier. I don't remember if it's been addressed before, but was there a reason that multiple characters couldn't be on-screen? It's also a bit distracting how characters don't stay on the screen when talking to characters lacking sprites as well. Also, it might have been just me, but I couldn't tell where the flashback started and ended in Chapter 2. Perhaps playing with the sound off had something to do with it, too. ^^;

Am I the only person who doesn't hate Asaga? ^^;

Regarding the gameplay, I thought the mechanics for the shooter portion was a pretty interesting! It kind of reminds me of turn-based fighting in RPGs, and I liked it quite a bit. Is it my imagination, or is the chance timing tightened on higher difficulties? There were a few times when I missed the second Chance! while playing on Hard, and it'd cost me precious healths.

Perhaps a workable alternative for losing the secondary bar would be to partially damage it when hit (on lower difficulties)? Or perhaps it could double as a shield bar to provide a trade-off between defense and ending the battle quicker. Either way, the bullet patterns didn't seem particularly friendly for shooter novices. Especially near-dead Machiavelli. That is just EVIL. If you can, save up a Delta to finish it off in one blow towards the end. O_O

Again, congrats on the release! I'll be looking forward to the future episodes!

Re: sake-bento - My younger sister also had quite an intense dislike for Haruhi. Something about her being really annoying... ^^;

[Scooter Fox]

What I like about this game (you can call it "game", right?) is the idea of joining a VN and a shoot 'em up into one. This is was enough to keep me playing, but I'm afraid it this and the concept of special attack system were the only things I liked in it.

- I really hate breast groping and bathroom peeking (intentional or not) kind of jokes. The story isn't great too, with all "hey, we're three teenage girls with traumatic past, so let's become space pilots and end the war on our own" stuff.
- The whole last pattern of the boss in 3rd episode can be avoided by using all three special attacks at the right time. I guess this was intentional though, considering how ridiculously hard it is compared to other parts of the game.
- The highest difficulty level isn't a bullet hell at all, so you can't call it "bullet hell". Let me repeat this: you can't call it "bullet hell". Got it? Bullet hell shooters are my favourite video game genre, so I can't stand such blasphemy. You can rename it to "impossible", "nightmare", "suicide" or anything similar (see below).
- Apart from above, the gap between "bullet hell" difficulty and "hard" one is ridiculous. Avoiding the second pattern of those three guys in 3rd episode is really hard, their missiles aren't easy to destroy too. Since on the highest difficulty level your ship is destroyed with one hit, this is like playing entirely different game. You should either make it easier or insert another level between "bullet hell" and "hard" - I didn't have much problems with clearing the latter while I didn't even bother with the former.

[chronoluminaire]

So since my first comment was done in stream-of-consciousness style, there were some things I didn't comment on. Let me put that to rights.

I quite like the plot and the setting. The different factions sound like they've got potential for nice politics. The girls are quite a lot of fun, although Asaga's the only one I really like so far. Chigara is clearly the library-drone loli, Ikkari is quite fun but a bit too tsundere. Asaga's got the dynamic make-things-happen-ism. And she's got a bit more of a figure than the others too

Yes, that's one aspect of not having any CGs: we've never seen the girls from any view except the waist-up one that we see in dialogue, so we don't know what their full costumes look like! Are they wearing skirts or flight suits? Long or short skirts? Stockings or bare legs? Inquiring players need to know! XD

And the combats were quite fun too. They managed to get me hooked enough that, even having beat the game on Moderate, I wanted to go back and try to beat it on Challenging. You've created a fun game!

More on the combats:
* The rotation order really confused me for ages. My default assumption is that Z would rotate the triplet anticlockwise and X would rotate them clockwise, but that's in reverse. I spent many combats having to guess which would be which, and often getting it wrong.

The way I finally figured out how to think about them is: Z selects the ship that's currently to the left, and X selects the ship that's currently to the right. Figuring that out made such a difference.

* I did find it confusing when the hit box clearly wasn't precisely the same shape as the ship. It was a little confusing right at the start to realise that the two switched-out ships didn't get hit. But the hit box is always confusing if it doesn't precisely match the shape of the player's sprite. Is there any reason not to just use actual collision detection? Or is it that the player's sprite is funky enough that it's got spiky bits that would make it too easy to get hit?

* I'd agree that the bullet patterns should vary a lot more with difficulty. Even if it's just the speed of the enemies' shots.

* The general difficulty level was about right for me (the bits that aren't changed by the "difficulty level" setting <_<). For almost all the attack patterns, I was able to find a way to dodge that let me built up to Delta Attacks, but it was still tricky enough that it was far from trivial, and a good challenge. I completed the game reasonably easily on Moderate, and after some practice on Challenging (at v0.9 standards).

* In particular, I found the gaps in the Machiavelli's curtains of red lasers after a few tries. That was a good example of being able to figure out reasonably easily what the thing to do is, but it being tricky enough to still be a good challenge. (And it's things like that that should vary with the difficulty level). Even the Machiavelli section with the pinwheel bullet-launchers was doable, if very tricky.

* The final section of the Machiavelli is the one that's completely absurd. I never accumulated a special attack against that. The thing to do seems to be to just use the red ship for as much as possible and just hope to weather the storm; but when it's launching missiles, switch to blue if she's still alive, because taking a few hits from the blue bullets is far less severe than taking a few missiles.

* I found that blue tended to die more quickly than the others, because her special charges so much quicker than the others that I let her take the hits when red or yellow have any special accumulated at all! I had to specifically make a point of letting whichever of red or yellow had empty special gauge take the hits on occasion, because otherwise blue dies too early, which means I miss out on the 3x modifier of red's chunky lasers

* Yeah, on the subject of the 3x multiplier: it'd be really good if during the dual and delta attacks, a little "2x!" or "3x!" would appear, just to indicate that that's what it's doing. I know you've explained it in the dialogue, once, but just on the principle of making things clear, it'd be good.