While I dither about The Balloonist, I've been working on a shmup, quite early days but just getting a feel for the performance of the device, which seems perfectly good.
If you are a shmup junkie, you might be interested in input latency, the time between pressing a button and seeing the corresponding action on the screen. There are Youtube videos where gamers try to set up Mame and other emulators to get the best response.
When programming in C, the system calls your update method (at say 50Hz) and then you call markUpdatedRows and it goes away and refreshes the display. Is this single-buffered? I'm wondering if we have single frame latency, as it does feel pretty responsive.
Could be a nice plus point for more action-oriented games. Can anybody share any details about the latency of the display buffer?
Some shmups have a hyper mode where the player is granted extra powers, but in mine it causes the oppo to slow down and is activated by undocking the crank.
You get a visual indication that time-stop mode is on with a bubble around the player's ship.
The pitch here is that this is a "bullet hell for beginners." At any time in the game, the player can slow things down and spend more time considering strategy.
Hopefully players who would normally be put off by the ridiculous pace of, and hand-eye control needed by, some shmups should find this more accessible.
The technical implementation of time-stop is just reducing the frame rate at the moment, but I will do it properly at some point and reduce the enemy and bullet deltas while keeping 50Hz.
Changed the slow-down aura to something I think looks better.
Also been working on the level select screen. Stars awarded for unlocking achievements still to go in, and not sure what to do about high scores for each level.
Was a bit worried to see that this screen would not run at 50Hz on the Playdate, but after a purge of multiplications and array accesses in inner loops, speed came up fine again
I haven't worked on any audio yet and there are no end-of-level bosses, want to add those. But I'm happy to make a time-limited alpha release, perhaps will be finished today if anyone would like to help with play testing.
Took a little longer than anticipated to finish up a release, and there is a known defect—although your achievements are persisted after closing the game, high scores for each level are not.
This looks so cool! I'm here because I'm trying to learn to develop for the playdate and came across your post. You have some excellent design skills and the game is looking brilliant so far. Keep going, I love it!
You are very kind, thank you! Added score persistence to my local build this afternoon and started to doodle some bosses. Hopefully make some progress over the next few days, really want to get it finished and out!
Hello!
I very much enjoyed your game, it was very fun! It felt very polished and I appreciated how simple it was. The only thing I would say was that there was a little meter-like thing in the right-hand corner which moved when I turned the crank, but I wasn't sure what it was supposed to do. But that's probably just me. Great work and keep it up!
EDIT: I just realized that the meter thing is probably the speed! That makes a lot of sense, just somehow I didn't put two and two together...
Thank you for playing! Yes, the documentation is very minimal but the crank position sets the speed of enemies and their bullets.
I thought the player ship would emit some kind of Star Trek-style dampening field, which is why you see the aura blocks around the ship when you have some slow-down in effect (the crank is undocked).
It would be possible to style the speed meter up a bit:
But what I found when playing myself is that I would either go for a speed run with the crank docked, or have it at about half way between fingers and then move to all the way down when I got into a troubling melee
I'm not sure it really needs much more than a basic indicator, might get in the way of the game if we put too much on the screen other than player and baddies.
I am still wondering about the z order of the elements. Currently I have the score and crank meter below the player and enemies, but I wonder if I should just over lay them on top of everything. Might give that a try.
Just wanted to say this looks great (visually and conceptually). I’ve always wanted to play more shmups but I’m not so good with games that require twitch action reflexes. Might give this one a whirl when you release!
Thank you! I can relate, as an older gamer who grew up when the arcades were in their heyday in the early 80s, it frustrates me sometimes that, although I still enjoy the arcade style, the games are too fast for older fingers.
The crank allows a slow-down of up to 80%, so enemies and bullets can move at one fifth of their normal speed. It's as though you can think and play 5x faster
I have two friends with cerebral palsy who are helping to test Space Mash. They have trouble even holding a small device, but can still complete the levels.
