Raidaa no Asahi

[Vatina]

Argh, can't beat Machiavelli.... will have to try again later.

The others have already mentioned a good deal of things that are important to say, so I'll try not to repeat them too much. First the characters and story:
I like the characters a lot ^^ I also like Asaga, though as soon as she started the boob-groping and such, I began to feel annoyed by her instead.... if not for that, I like her. Ikkari is my favourite
There is one thing that kind of put me off with Ikkari, during the second episode.

She sees a Ryder and says that she hasn't been in one for a long time. The others ask if she was a pilot, and she says it was many years ago - exactly how old are these girls for this to be possible? They are all wonder-pilots too... but I guess that's anime logic for you

In the scenes where there was supposed to be CG's and you have descriptions in [ ] instead, I think you should go with narration instead to explain what's going on, as someone else already pointed out. It seems a little odd otherwise.

About the combat engine, I think it is a really great idea. The turn combat and switching between ships is a fun concept, and I really enjoyed it. I also thought that sometimes the battles were dragging out, though.
The music was really fitting, especially during combat ^^ But didn't the sound volume change sometimes from track to track?

The track in the apartment reminds me of a track from My HiME.

It was from My Hime, wasn't it? I thought so too....

I think that was all.... Anyway this was a nice release, and I'm really looking forward to what else comes out of this ^^ In the meantime I'll try to actually reach the ending....

[mikey]

I installed the codecs and it still doesn't work... Are there some other requirements?

(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.)

Thanks!
This reminds me... the new Kinght Rider ^_^

[bloodywyvern]

Hmm well playing through I think it's a pretty good release ^^ There's a certain simplicity to it that appeals to a broader range...My main problems:

1.) The enemies (or lack of them)...I was kinda expecting a large number of easier to kill types, rather than a few endurance match's in a row. This ties directly in to number two.

2.) Switching between attack and defense positions. Somehow I didn't find the endless switching back and forth to be a very appealing point, it just threw me off. Sure it represents the idea of getting behind your opponent, but technically you wouldn't need to do so that many times (this goes back to earlier posts about endurance).

What I DID like:

1.) The characters seemed well thought out, but the story could have been a bit longer for my taste ;_; very nicely done though. I actually liked all of them, and will join the dwindling side of those who don't hate Asaga.

2.) The special gauge resetting was a good solution to the consequence of getting hit a lot (since you don't lose much health). I kind of just thought of it as "power is being drained to supply the shields". Still I agree maybe it should chip down slowly, rather than instantly.

3.) Having the two ships not in the front still shooting, but just at lesser degree's. It made it feel more like you were part of a team, and working together. One thing though, I'd like to see the back ships gain special gauge for their attacks just at a fraction of the normal rate (like 10%).

Other than that I just want to say great job! ^^ oh and for those who find the []'s to be strange...I'd say they more just need to be gotten used to. Utawarerumono used them (just - -'s instead) quite successfully. Though certain events would be better off in novel format.

[Jake]

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

I'm thinking short skirts with stockings. Definitely. There's no other way it could be!

* 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?

To be honest, this is something of a staple of the genre, really. Generally speaking, scrolling shooters come in three [very-broad] categories:

- At one end, games with sparse bullets, instant-kill (e.g. Gradius, R-Type) - these tend to have an AABB hitbox that covers most, but not all, of the ship. Check the player-ship in this video, for example, of Gradius3 with the hit boxes displayed. The real important thing is to not have any empty-space collidable, 'cause players will hate that - but they'll forgive you if the fins and stuff don't get hit.

- At the other end, so-called 'Bullet Hell' games; hundreds if not thousands of bullets, instant-kill (e.g. Shikigami no Shiro, Touhou) - these typically have very small hitboxes (probably circular) at the core of the player avatar - check out this Touhou video and see how many times bullets pass over the player character's sprite - but critically not over the small circle right at the centre which is sometimes highlighted. The emphasis in bullet-hell games is on weaving through tight patterns of bullets almost more than on shooting stuff.

- Somewhere in between, everything else; approaching-bullet-hell levels of bullets, spaceship-game-style hitboxes, and typically a health gauge. Games occupying this middle ground (e.g. the recent 'Söldner-X') often get referred to as 'Euroshmups' - a perjorative - suggesting that the health gauge is added to bypass problems with the bullet patterns that mean it's impossible to not get hit sometimes, that style has been elevated above substance and pretty graphics used to cover up gameplay flaws.


Still, these are by no means black-and-white rules, and I've thoroughly enjoyed some games which might be called 'euroshmups' - to return to the original point, I guess, you'll note that none of those categories include 'pixel-perfect collision detection'. Going back into the dim and distant reaches of time, I expect this was originally for performance reasons - these days that's less of an issue, of course, but still - nobody really notices non-pixel-perfect collision, so nobody's ever really bothered with it. What people notice is collision detection which isn't where they expect it to be - a bounding-box in a bullet-hell game, or a tiny circle in a spaceship game. And in a lot of games - stuff like R-Type and Raidaa no Asahi included - people would get frustrated if all those fins and pylons around their ship extended their collision radius/bounding box out as well.

* 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.

As it goes - the approach that I've taken to this for my project was to parameterise the bullet-pattern behaviours.

For example, I don't have a "fire a fifty-degree spread of bullets" method, I have a "fire a spread of X bullets with a Y degree gap between each bullet". Then, difficulty is represented as a number between 1 and 0, with smaller numbers being easier, and I can (say) set X to (10*difficulty) and Y to (5/difficulty). On normal, where difficulty = 0.5, this ends up with (a 50-degree spread of) 5 bullets with 10-degree gaps between them; on easy, at d=0.25, it's 2.5 (3) bullets with 20-degree gaps; on super-hard, d=1, it's 10 bullets with 5-degree gaps.

So the spread is still roughly 50 degrees on all difficulties, but the number of bullets increases and the gaps between them decrease as the difficulty goes up... and best of all, I should really only have to write and balance the stages on 'normal', the other difficulties will mostly be taken care of just by shuffling 'd' up and down.


[EDIT: A simple way to make the differences between difficulty levels more distinct which probably shouldn't involve very much more coding at all would be to vary the amount of the player's charge gauge gets removed when they get hit. Make it 100% on the hardest levels, 10% on 'Visual Novel', 50% on 'Moderate' or something... thus, people playing on easy because they're bad at bullet-dodging actually get to see the dual and delta attacks more often than once right at the beginning of the game.]

* 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).

I had a similar experience on challenging - but I play more bullet-hell shooters than anything else; I'm so used to one-hit kills that my estimation of the difficulty of the patterns is based on not getting hit at all.

Even the Machiavelli section with the pinwheel bullet-launchers was doable, if very tricky.

Hmm, I found the pinwheel bullet-launchers really easy - hence the comment about the red-streams section being harder than the next one...

just hope to weather the storm

...and this is exactly the kind of gameplay element I don't like in a shooter, myself. :/

* 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.

I'd totally concur - since there's no graphical indicator that it's any more powerful than releasing the two attacks separately, by the time I was up to the Machiavelli I had to watch the enemy's health bar to convince myself that I was really doing more damage that way.

(If it's really 3x, I'd also consider a 4x multiplier for the final attack; it's much easier to build up two gauges than three, 'cause you can use the third ship you're not charging for the dodging sections... so if you're not capable of dodging the attacks, then you should still be able to charge up two gauges relatively easily in the dogfighting scenes... but if you are capable of dodging, the third ship doesn't give you a proportional reward.)


Mikey: Unfortunately, looking through the files, there's a "Music Credits" list which looks like this:

Code: Select all

Music Credits

"Honobono" - Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha
"Oharahetta!" - Mai-Otome
"Kin no Senkou (ver Impulse)" - Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha Strikers
"Jigoku Metal" - Jigoku Shojo
"Au Soleil" - Shakugan no Shana Second
"Kumo to Rouba to Shoujo" - Jigoku Shojo
"Bijo to Yajuu" - Erementar Gerad
"Insanity" - Moonlit Archives
"Star Fox Main Theme" - Star Fox
"Game Over" - Star Fox Assault
"Luna Marionette" - AKHT
"Main Title Theme" Star Fox Assault

- So I guess that disqualifies it from the RAA anyway, unless validly-licensed music is used to replace all that?

[Nafai]

Episode 1 "Liveblogging"

- Buttons galore
- Uhm, how do I get out of the information page?
- Nice work on the ship!
- The bgs are muted but I can tell they’re well made  The character art has personality and I can easily tell the characters apart – the higher quality of the BGs kind of makes it a jarring contrast though.
- Hm, Kyst and Rai have identical expressions though, it just occurred to me…
- A narration/narrator with personality. (Downtrodden and put-upon but still…) I like.
- Ah the old hide in the box trick. Snake would be proud. Love the music 
- Hm, save button save button… right click? Nopr. Escape? Hm… auto save huh. Lets try that…
- Uhoh -checkpoint saves. Time to redo some stuff…
- Okaaay… obviously Ikarri wasn’t inspired by a certain Ikari Shinji…. @_@
- 4th wall breakage 
- Wow, like this battle system. Sort of like turn based R-Type… I think since this is set on easy, I can do this!
- Apparently I can’t. @_@ VN-Level should do it for me.
- There you are – hm, I thought there would be more of a “Next Episode” teaser – that’s perfect for 4th wall breakage humor ^^

[DaFool]

Nothing much I can add to the comments...

Well, I finally beat the episode 1 stage, so I'm proud of myself &_&
I'm getting the hang of it... its slightly weird setup, but it's cool.

The girls are just adorable, and play well into their stereotypes. When they first appear and the cute music plays... my brother was in the room and we just cracked up laughing... it just fit them so much!

That said... man, you got to replace those soundtracks with original ones or else it can't go to RAA. Trouble is that the pieces you selected were perfect fits already T_T.

Great game, usually games like these I just grab from some Comicket torrents and barely play for an hour or so. You got me hooked here. Great job.

[Jake]

- The bgs are muted but I can tell they’re well made  The character art has personality and I can easily tell the characters apart – the higher quality of the BGs kind of makes it a jarring contrast though.

Man, yeah - I totally meant to mention this and forgot. Even glassed-out, the BGs are impressive. Similarly 3D-modelled to the ships, presumably?

[Samu-kun]

Yeah... I was very confused when Ren asked if I wanted this in the RAA since I've already said in the WIP topic and a couple other places that this wouldn't meet the requirements. But I figured that you folks would recongnize most of the tunes instantly. They're all from pretty popular animes. XD

Second, we have the issues of the sound effects. I have no idea where they're from. I got them from a bunch of soundmod packages for other games that were collected by people other than myself.

Also, I better clarify another thing: I didn't make the backgrounds. I've already said in the WIP topic that I couldn't. XD They were taken from another game and then just run through filters. Actually, all the backgrounds were taken from Lionhead's the Movies. All I did was just make a movie in there with all the sets I needed, set up the camera angles so that it looked like typical visual novel background, exported the movie file, and then use Adobe Premieres to take screenshots of the movie. Eh, I didn't really want to take backgrounds from another game, but I didn't have much of a choice here. There are pretty much no royalty free backgrounds of starship bridges. o_o; Especially three of them.

So yeah, this definately does not meet the requirements for submission. The resource burden for this game's pretty high, since it's not only a VN but also a SHMUP as well.

I'm trying to atleast have original backgrounds in my future games, but unless a musician signs up to join the development, I'm either going to have to use royalty free music or just using songs from animes like I've done here. And the sound effects, I definately can't do anything about. There just needs to be way too many of them to simply use royalty free ones. If it were just a visual novel, it would be possible because there isn't as big of a need for sound effects. But this is also a SHMUP. I pretty much need 5 different sounds for each laser, 5 more different sounds of guns, 5 different sounds of explosions, etc. There's just too high of a resource burden.

Another comment I feel I should make is that I was expecting quite a bit of resistance from fans of traditional bullet curtain SHMUPS. The truth is that Raidaa really isn't a real danmaku. At no point in the development did I ever intend to create a danmaku. The combat engine's more remininisant of an action based RPG battle, from which it gets most of its inspiration from. But I guess the exact genre of the gameplay segments is still quite undefinable. It's not really quite a danmaku SHMUP, nor a real action RPG battle either. I just wanted to create something innovative that'll be fun, and I'll be sticking with this method for all my future games as well. I fully expected many purist danmaku fans to be up in arms about all the changes I've made to the genre. XD The SHMUP, just like the VN, pretty much only has a niche market outside of Japan, and many of its fans are very loyal to the genre. I was almost halfway expecting somebody to complain that there's no one hit kill system in Raidaa, since it's a staple of the genre. That's why I included the final difficulty option. I honestly don't think it's possible to beat the game on it, but it's to prove a point more than anything. The fact remains, Raidaa isn't a danmaku and shouldn't really be approached as one. The genre is undefinable, as it should be. I kind of like it better this way. It's something new. I'll always be looking for ways to break the rules of convention when it comes to gameplay. 95% of the commerical games I play now bore me since it's the same rules I've seen in every other game. Some games try to change the rules around (eg. dynamic reloading in Gears of War, rechargeable shields in Halo) but this is just changing the icing on the cake. The truth is, not many people have really created a game that managed to be undefinable in genre. That's precisely what I want to do.

And mirrored:

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

Thanks for the mirror. ^_^

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?

Hahhh... Congrats, I think you're the first person that pointed out the Kanon reference! There's also two more references to other animes in the game. Can you find 'em? XD

Honestly, I didn't really like Haruhi either. If I were to make a list of my top 20 favorite anime characters, Haruhi probably wouldn't be on there. The only reason I reference her is because she's god. Mm... And now that I think, when I started writing the story, I didn't really like Asaga either. XD My favorite character was and still is Chigara. But near the end of the story, I liked Ikkari and Asaga equally well, with Chigara just a squeee bit ahead of them. I don't really think I had much of a choice in what happened in the story. The characters just wrote it themselves. And it happened that Asaga really isn't that bad of a person as she comes off to be at first, since she does have some of an idealistic and innocent side that starts coming off in episode 2... Uhh... Atleast I think. When she's not busy trying to create excitement/trouble for everyone else, atleast. XD

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.

Mmm.. I decided to post this on GMC by the way. I haven't checked up on how the topic's doing, but I can say that I have very low expectations. XD

Congratulations on completion. ::thumbs up::

Waaahhh, thanks for the fanart!!! *huggles picture* She's soo cute! ^_^

I don't remember if it's been addressed before, but was there a reason that multiple characters couldn't be on-screen?

Mm... The current engine can indeed display multiple characters. It's that I didn't choose to, since I wanted all the attention to be focused on a single character portrait. I tried both displaying all the portraits one by one and displaying them all at once, and I kind of liked the one by one system a bit better. It draws more attention to each individual character expression more, I think.

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

Hah... I think there's quite a bit of other people who don't. XD

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.

Mm... It should be the same for all difficulties. I think it's just psychological, since you're more mentally tense on the higher difficulties and you tend to make more slip ups.

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.

Mm... On regards to the story, it's really a matter of taste, I guess. XD I love silly romance animes, so that's where Raidaa gets most of its inspiration from. The other parts of your post, I've answered earlier in my post.

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

Yosha, an Asaga fan! See, there are other people who like Asaga! XD

* 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.

As stated in the WIP topic before, I think this is the best example of the perspective of difficulty between the developer and the player. The last stage of the Machiavelli is actually my favorite part of the game, since that's the only part of the game I really need to try hard to even get a dual strike. (I usually manage to charge up a Ikkari-Asaga dual strike during that last segment and finish it off though) But this was a mistake on my part, since I should have known that what's hard for the developer is insanely impossible for the player. Another something to keep in mind for future projects. ^_^

It was from My Hime, wasn't it? I thought so too....

I think that was all.... Anyway this was a nice release, and I'm really looking forward to what else comes out of this ^^ In the meantime I'll try to actually reach the ending....

Yup, that is from Mai-Hime and Mai-Otome. The full music credits, as pointed out, are found in the music folder.

Crap. I just remembered I set the settings for that folder to be hidden to hide the external data and the .txt including the credits list is in there. -_-; Since I released this game really, really quickly to start working on my next game ASAP, I forgot to include an in-game credits list. I didn't really mean anything sneaky by it... As a matter of fact, I've already posted in the WIP topic that I was going to use music from animes in it. But it looks like Jake managed to find the list afterall, so maybe all is not lost. ^_^; But as stated before, the music is from various animes and video games like Mai-Otome, Nanoha, Jigoku Shojo, and Star Fox.

I installed the codecs and it still doesn't work... Are there some other requirements?

Wah... I wonder what could be the matter. -_-;; Sorry about making you go through all this trouble. You do have have DirectX 8 or later, right? Uhh... I wonder if Papillion knows more about this than I do...

- Uhm, how do I get out of the information page?

Press escape. But I think you've already figured that out. XD

- Okaaay… obviously Ikarri wasn’t inspired by a certain Ikari Shinji…. @_@

Mmm... Actually, you're the second person to think that and that's really quite interesting, considering that I don't even know who Shinji is. (Guy from Evangalion, I think?) I'm surprised more people haven't seen parallels between her and Eika Ichijo from Sky Girls, because most of Ikkari's personality is based on her. ^_^;

Man, yeah - I totally meant to mention this and forgot. Even glassed-out, the BGs are impressive. Similarly 3D-modelled to the ships, presumably?

Obviously, no. XD The ships I did make myself, and I'm very happy with how they turned out. The backgrounds I did not.

[Samu-kun]

More on the Kanon reference...

You have no idea how hard I had to fight the urge to have Chigara moan "Uguu..." when her suit breaks.

Or have her name it something like "Unrestricted refriGeration Ultramatic Unit" (U.G.U.U.) XD

[Vatina]

More on the Kanon reference...

Or have her name it something like "Unrestricted refriGeration Ultramatic Unit" (U.G.U.U.) XD

Lol that's a cool idea xD I thought it was really cute reference by the way

[mikey]

Wah... I wonder what could be the matter. -_-;; Sorry about making you go through all this trouble. You do have have DirectX 8 or later, right?

I have the latest 9-series Direct-X, as I more or less only play racing games and visual novels. DX can't be a problem, I think. Ah, man...

[Jake]

The resource burden for this game's pretty high, since it's not only a VN but also a SHMUP as well.

You are not giving me a warm happy feeling about our NaNo project this year...

I'm either going to have to use royalty free music or just using songs from animes like I've done here.

Look around, I think you'll probably be surprised at the quality and variety of music that's available under applicable CC licenses. I know we found enough tracks on places like Jamendo or CCMixter when looking for MorningStar BGM that we could have filled the game three or four times over without much searching effort.

And the sound effects, I definately can't do anything about. There just needs to be way too many of them to simply use royalty free ones. If it were just a visual novel, it would be possible because there isn't as big of a need for sound effects. But this is also a SHMUP. I pretty much need 5 different sounds for each laser, 5 more different sounds of guns, 5 different sounds of explosions, etc. There's just too high of a resource burden.

Again, there are free sound effects around if you look for them. And there's free tools like SFXR which allow you to generate your own pretty trivially, without having much (any) audio engineering knowledge.

At no point in the development did I ever intend to create a danmaku. The combat engine's more remininisant of an action based RPG battle, from which it gets most of its inspiration from. But I guess the exact genre of the gameplay segments is still quite undefinable. It's not really quite a danmaku SHMUP, nor a real action RPG battle either. I just wanted to create something innovative that'll be fun, and I'll be sticking with this method for all my future games as well.

For what it's worth, as much as I am a big fan of danmaku-style games, I'm perfectly open to trying new things. I just felt it was worth bringing up those points I did, 'cause they seemed to me to be areas in which the game could be improved without losing the fairly unique approach.

However:

The genre is undefinable, as it should be. I kind of like it better this way. It's something new.

It's something new, certainly - I don't remember any shooting game with a similar mechanic. But I'd not call it 'undefinable' - far from it. It's still pretty clearly in the 2D-shooter bracket, for starters. One can get more specific than that, even - the shooting part is arguably a boss-rush game, it's bombless, one-life... something can be unique without being genreless.

Of course, the other thing to remember is that as soon as something comes along which really does fit totally outside of all existing genres, a new genre instantly exists to encompass it...


Anyway. I would advise that most genres are there for a reason. This is generally summed up in the statement "99% of modern art is hated by 99% of people". That art which pushes the boundaries, the 'avant garde', is usually totally inaccessible to anyone but the artist. Often, they're only happy to make stuff which is so divorced from existing art that it's barely recognisable - they alienate their entire audience by deliberatly being different. That doesn't mean it's not art, and it doesn't mean that all avant-garde art is bad - in fact, some portion of it will be looked back upon in fifty years time as visionary and classic, and sometimes that same art was villified in its time. Now, existing FPSs, platform games - and, of course, 2D shooters - have evolved the way they have and share that core set of gameplay features because those features are fun to play, and they work. It doesn't mean that one absolutely has to stick to the formula in order to make a fun game, just that you're far more likely to make your game not-fun-to-play by deliberately deviating from those core shared elements than by using them.

Often, though, this comes down to the old question about art - is it made for the artist, or for the audience? If you're making games for yourself, then of course whatever you're happy with is the best product. I guess what I'm trying to say, though, is that if you're making games for other people then the important thing is that you make a game which is fun, not a game which is revolutionary. They can be the same thing, but often they aren't - a large proportion of attempted revolutions fail.

(Of course, I'm talking in general terms, here, in response to the "I will always try and make genre-breaking games" comment. I think that the deviations you've made in this particular game are all pretty interesting and certainly not detracting from the enjoyment of the game!)

Some games try to change the rules around (eg. dynamic reloading in Gears of War, rechargeable shields in Halo) but this is just changing the icing on the cake.

I've not played Gears, but seriously - the recharging in Halo totally changes the play dynamic compared to most first-person shooters before it. It's the one thing about Halo that I would consider underrated, rather than overrated, and there's a reason that it's been widely copied since.

Crap. I just remembered I set the settings for that folder to be hidden to hide the external data and the .txt including the credits list is in there. -_-; Since I released this game really, really quickly to start working on my next game ASAP, I forgot to include an in-game credits list. I didn't really mean anything sneaky by it... As a matter of fact, I've already posted in the WIP topic that I was going to use music from animes in it. But it looks like Jake managed to find the list afterall, so maybe all is not lost. ^_^; But as stated before, the music is from various animes and video games like Mai-Otome, Nanoha, Jigoku Shojo, and Star Fox.

Well, Jake turned "show hidden files and folders" on as soon as he got his computer, because he thinks the OS doesn't know best about what he wants to see on his filesystem. By default most people won't have this enabled...

[F.I.A]

Congratulations on your first game.

Pros:

- The whole vn + shmup is something I enjoy.
- A rather innovative gameplay. I have yet to see a shmup that uses turn based system.
- All rounded laser, Spread laser and Slow-but-strong laser. What is not to love?

Cons:

- The usual cliche of unexperienced civilians being great at first flight. While I understand about Ikkari being a ex-pilot, and that Asaga is the heir to the Okashi company while Chigara a tech geek... the fact that they can beat experienced soldiers does not add up.
- While the turn based fight is to be praised, I have to agree with others that it can be rather time consuming(And frustrating when you are about to unleash your attacks, only to be attacked out of it).
- The Bullet Hell difficulty. While it is true that most shmups have those "hit and your are dead", they are mostly having a small frame for the craft to allow traveling between bullets. I tried that in this game, and got myself shot when the craft just grazed the wing...

And other stumpers:
- How to access Extra?

And that's all for now. Thanks for the game, and good luck in continuing it.

[Samu-kun]

Look around, I think you'll probably be surprised at the quality and variety of music that's available under applicable CC licenses. I know we found enough tracks on places like Jamendo or CCMixter when looking for MorningStar BGM that we could have filled the game three or four times over without much searching effort.

Thanks for the links. ^_^ I'll definately search around there when making future games. ^_^

Anyway. I would advise that most genres are there for a reason. This is generally summed up in the statement "99% of modern art is hated by 99% of people". That art which pushes the boundaries, the 'avant garde', is usually totally inaccessible to anyone but the artist. Often, they're only happy to make stuff which is so divorced from existing art that it's barely recognisable - they alienate their entire audience by deliberatly being different. That doesn't mean it's not art, and it doesn't mean that all avant-garde art is bad - in fact, some portion of it will be looked back upon in fifty years time as visionary and classic, and sometimes that same art was villified in its time. Now, existing FPSs, platform games - and, of course, 2D shooters - have evolved the way they have and share that core set of gameplay features because those features are fun to play, and they work. It doesn't mean that one absolutely has to stick to the formula in order to make a fun game, just that you're far more likely to make your game not-fun-to-play by deliberately deviating from those core shared elements than by using them.

Yes, I do believe I am quite an oddball when it comes to this. I'm a pretty big traditionalist when it comes to writing the story. I think you should stick with character archtypes and a theme that's universal to everyone. But I agree that I made a mistake when I said that the genre was undefinable. Perhaps saying that the genre is a hybrid of bits and pieces from a multitude of unrelated genres that were meshed together to create something new would be more accurate. I'd have to say that Raidaa, on the whole, is a kinetic novel-shmup-action RPG battle hybrid, if you really want to pick a genre for it. I guess a more accurate description of my game making style is to take aspects of different genres that I like and mesh them all together to create something nobody's ever seen before. In many ways, I guess the best analogy for this is cooking. I have a bunch of ingrediants that I mix together without following the cooking directions to create something new. The taste of the individual ingrediants themselves can't be changed, just as each base gameplay of each genre can't be changed - but I can mix them together to create an altogether different flavor at the end. I think it's impossible to attempt to change the taste of each ingrediant. I guess I am kind of a traditionalist when it comes to this. I think each distinguishing gameplay mechanic of each genre (eg. turn based attacks in turn based tactical RPGs, bullet dodging in shmups) can't be changed. Instead, they're only building blocks that can be used to construct a new game that nobody's ever seen before. I don't change the bricks that I build the house with. It's just that I rearrange the bricks to create a unique one.

Congratulations on your first game.

Thanks. ^_^ Releasing this game certainly was a great learning experiance. I feel like my abilities have increased by about 10 fold thanks to Raidaa and everyone's feedback. ^_^ In regards to what you said about the plotholes, I will try to address most of them when I rewrite the game's script.

- How to access Extra?

Mmm... I added that button very early in the development when I thought I was going to release Raidaa in 5 volumes of 3-4 episodes each. Obviously, there were some changes in plans since the, so the extras button doesn't do anything right now.

[Samu-kun]

Mmm... Now I have a bunch of questions for the community. ^_^

1. It seems that the majority of you didn't really like the fanservice. Had there been CGs accompanying those scenes (Asaga making Kaito grope her, Ikkari falling on top of Chigara), then would your opinion of those scenes changed?

And the more important question:

2. The WIP topic obviously played a significant role in the development of this game. I think that had I not kept a WIP topic going, there were hundreds of rough events that would have caused me to give up and cancel the project. The encouragement everyone gave me in the WIP topic was one of the biggest reasons that you're seeing this game here in the completed game forum right now. Furthermore, the WIP topic allowed me to create plans. When I first came to post something in the WIP topic, I honestly had no clue what my goals were and why exactly I was spending so much of my spare time I could have been using to do other things (eg. dating. -_-; I am 18 and in college you know. -_-;) to make this project. But posting in the WIP topic made everything suddenly make sense again. So it's pretty much without question that I will begin another WIP topic for my next game pretty soon.
However, I'm also thinking that the WIP topic raised everyone's expectations too high and that the game ultimately didn't meet those expectations. What were your expectations of this game before playing it, and were those expectations met? Do you think that had I not kept a WIP topic and aimed instead for a surprise, silent release, your response to the game would have changed?

EDIT: In retrospect, I should ask a third question.

3. What are your opinions on the Ren'Ai Archives? Should the next game be created to meet the requirements for submission? It's obviously a small trade off. The sound effects might be a bit limited and the music might not fit as perfectly, but there are also big advantages of being on the Archives as well. Obviously, since I'm still kind of new here, I don't really know what kind of an influence the RAA has... Would you like the game more if it were on the Archive?