The Harrowing by K.Chplr
A bullet hell game heavily influenced by classic japanese danmaku games.
Try to get the best highscore by shooting the enemy while avoiding its endless rain of bullets.
How to play :
Arrows or WASD to move.
SPACE OR X to shoot.
SHIFT, CTRL or V to focus (slow down and show your hitbox to help navigating dense bullet patterns).
Compatibility :
The game was only tested on Chrome so far and it should run fine on Firefox to, albeit slower.
Technologies : html, javascript, shaders.
Development tools : phpstorm, node, npm, browserify.
Sound : Mammut, FL Studio, several VSTs.
Visual assets : GIMP.
Several features did not make it into the game : sprites for the player and the enemy (completely forgot), music (the drone was only supposed to be used in the menu), reactive audio, fullscreen mode, procedural generation of patterns and twitter sharing of highscores.
Try to get the best highscore by shooting the enemy while avoiding its endless rain of bullets.
How to play :
Arrows or WASD to move.
SPACE OR X to shoot.
SHIFT, CTRL or V to focus (slow down and show your hitbox to help navigating dense bullet patterns).
Compatibility :
The game was only tested on Chrome so far and it should run fine on Firefox to, albeit slower.
Technologies : html, javascript, shaders.
Development tools : phpstorm, node, npm, browserify.
Sound : Mammut, FL Studio, several VSTs.
Visual assets : GIMP.
Several features did not make it into the game : sprites for the player and the enemy (completely forgot), music (the drone was only supposed to be used in the menu), reactive audio, fullscreen mode, procedural generation of patterns and twitter sharing of highscores.
| Web | http://www.kchapelier.com/ludumdare31/ |
| Source | https://github.com/kchapelier/ludumdare31 |
| Original URL | https://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=46806 |
Ratings
| Coolness | 72% | 3 |
| Overall | 3.24 | 512 |
| Audio | 2.90 | 439 |
| Fun | 3.18 | 458 |
| Graphics | 2.76 | 759 |
| Mood | 3.15 | 364 |
| Theme | 3.50 | 690 |
A few moments later:
Game works on Chrome (as stated) but not IE or FF.
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On to review:
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Mechanically very sound game though - Was impressed :D Had to mute though after a little while. Controls are standard and responsive, and the difficulty is up where it should be, though it might be an idea to "work up" to hell-mode over the course of the first minute or so, to stop people from being killed by the first wave and quitting lmao!
Really nice. I hope this does well :)
Thanks for the head up about the firefox compatibility issue, it turned out to be an issue with the css of the page containing the game. I had to triple check the compo rules to make sure fixing it was allowed, but the game should now be displayed correctly on Firefox.
PS : As for Touhou, my favorite was Eiyashou ;)
In these type of games it's easy to lose track of a unit, and the basic indicator on the bottom helps navigate the mass of projectiles being thrown at you. Certainly something interesting in battles with 1 specific unit on screen.
The game feels like a traditional bullethell game, but with a more simplistic art style. I enjoyed playing this for quite a bit.
I had significant frame-skipping issues on firefox, but Chrome was smoother.
I've wanted to produce a game like this ever since - now I'm definately inspired to actually get on with it!
really hard game, but nice one
maybe i'm a noob player, but i don't see how i can avoid so many attacks at once o_O
interesting game nevertheless :)
Very cool spawners.
I think it needs some graphical polish and gameplay "juice" to be more enjoyable.
@Nardom - About the enemy indicator : to be fair this is just a feature I replicated from other games of this particular genre. Imo, the feature could also works in games with multiple units on screen with small or low contrast indicators for the minor enemies and big or high contrast indicators for the stronger enemies.
@tmpxyz, @ianh and @gre - Multiples lives, bombs, smaller hitboxes and progressive difficulty are all valid solutions for the balancing issue, I'll definitely investigate them, but the main problem may be with how random some patterns are. Most of the patterns requires too much moving around and none of them allow 'streaming' (which is one of the things which gives immediate gratification to the player in this kind of game).
@MurderSantaTeam - Yes, pure unforgiving arcade gameplay from hell ! Yes, too much hell in my bullet hell...
@dusho - My personal highscore is 62,000 ;)
Good job on this! (;
You made a big help putting a boss position indicator on the bottom of the screen... helped a lot!
The hitbox was a bit cunfusing... Sometimes bullets crossed my squareship and didn't hurt anything and other times a little touch on a minimum section of an edge took my life! :(
but this is a nice game! :)
One thing that did come up while I was playing was that the enemy seemed to have a weird obsession with the left side of the screen, often going to wait in the corner. I don't think I ever saw him more all the way to the right. This caused some problems with some of his attacks, mainly the ones that cycle clockwise, so perhaps look at your RNG to see if there's something going on there.
@taviandir - The purpose of the focus mode is to slow down and display the actual hitbox of the player (which is smaller than its sprite). I'll add a note about this feature in the game description.
@victorafael - The hitbox of the player is smaller than its sprite, but all the hitboxes are square, even those of the bullets. Maybe the confusions comes from there, I'll have to test using round hitboxes in the postjam.
@RockhopperGames - Yes, there's definitely something going on with the enemy glueing itself to the sides of the screen at times. The issue is likely with how the enemy movement is limited to the inside the screen.