Hi Monster!

I was going to play your game but I get some errors when I try and launch it.

ptthreadGC-3.dll missing

SDL2_mixer.dll missing

SDL2.dll missing

I'm not sure if thats on my end or not but it's stopping me from being able to play your game.

@call-me-nutty -- Oh shoot - I completely forgot to add those to the zip file.

I'll get right on that.

@themonsterfromthedeep ok! I'll make sure to get playing when you're done!

@call-me-nutty : Okay, so I've uploaded a new release that has all the required DLLs. Thanks for letting me know about that problem so soon, otherwise almost nobody would be able to play my game. :smile:

One of the best games I've played today. I had a blast playing your game. At one point I had to question if this game was even made for the compo. There's just SO MUCH content. The way the new enemies and weapons are introduced is done in a way that the player has just enough time to study their unique attack patterns. It was all so polished as well, everything from the Hyperspeed sequeuences to the art and colours, it was SO clean.

Now, I was originally thinking of giving this a 5* overall but I physically can not bring myself to mainly because the most glaring issue with the game is the "We'll just put a giant wall of bullets" level design in the later stages of the game. I actually made it to the final boss but when he sticks out like 10 ships in one swoop... you know - I died. Either make the whole game a bit larger (if you know what I mean) or give the player a shield ability of sorts.

Otherwise, there should have also been a better way to tell the player they took damage. It gets pretty hectic! So it's difficult to hear the player damage noise. A red flicker should do the trick.

Great entry! I hope more people find your game!

Cool game, restricting player movement is adequately explained. Loved the retro style and the linear difficulty increase (Each level a new enemy) The overall mystery to the story was nice, loved playing it!

@call-me-nutty:
Thank you for all the feedback.

I do understand exactly what you are saying in terms of the "giant wall of bullets." A lot of the screens I tried to design more strategicially, however, there was one that I explicitly built with the purpose of making the player take damage (i.e. the one with all the blue ships).

There are several other screens with the same problem, though, that were not meant to be that way, and that I am somewhat less happy about.

The final boss I'm afraid I only had about an hour to try and balance. It is supposed to have a period between ship-spawning that corresponds somewhat to which ships it spawned, but it certainly isn't perfect. If you're lucky, you'll get an easier set of ships. I know this because I did manage to beat it.

Player feedback is definitely the biggest weakness of this game. I wanted to add knockback, particle effects, etc..., as well as a player health bar on the top of the screen, but I never really got around to it.

But, I'm glad you liked it!

It was very enjoyable and it had very nice graphics. One thing I would like to mention is that on the final boss fight, you can just fly above where the ships are spawning, and sit there shooting the boss without having to deal with the ships (until you kill the boss, then you have to kill them).

@admiralspacekraken : I was certainly aware of that, which is why I gave the boss some bullets that it shoots as well -- in my experience, if you are too close to the boss, it's basically impossible to avoid the bullets it shoots.

However, I didn't test that particularly much, and I am aware of a problem with my collision detection that means horizontal-ish bullets often aren't detected.

So if you can win that way, well, I would say it's officially sanctioned. :wink:

The game is very captivant.
I don't know if that was made on purpose, but i think the player collider is to small, because the projectiles can go through the ship sprite and not damage the player.
And i know about an exploit in this kind of games, the firing is basicly calling a method if the space is held after a specific amount of time, but if you spam the space bar the projectiles count is a lot bigger.

This is not usually my sort of game but I quite enjoyed playing it. Love all the variety of weapons and enemies. Nice work.

@johnyf : Yep, a small player hitbox is a standard thing in bullet hell games, at least from what I've read. :slight_smile: And yes, it's intentional that you can shoot faster if you can hit space fast -- the relevant line is https://notabug.org/TheMonsterFromTheDeep/warp-tunnel/src/master/src/player.c#L142

Really nice game. I liked the retro mood, kinda reminded me of space invaders at first.

Your music is super, super loud. I had to knock my system volume to 20% to play comfortably. However, pretty much everything else here is great. Good, mysterious and energetic music, appropriate sound-effects. Difficulty ramps up well, though there's a point where it's really just an unnavigable wall of bullets.

Still, player health is pretty generous (and I like the on-fire health display, gets pretty funny when you're just barely holding on, too) so as long as you can respond quickly and prioritize the most dangerous targets you can get things down to a more manageable level on most stages. The tradeoff of being faster for dealing with the narrower space to work with felt good. I like the red assymetrical enemies with the mines, though the mines' projectiles could be just a bit tough to read against the background.

This is great, I had a lot of fun with it!

Really solid game, with plenty of enemy variations and interesting waves! The mechanics were on point and the graphics and sound as well. My only complain is the shots blending in with the background, especially for the early enemies.

I also liked that it was as much a puzzle game because of solving the patterns, until the boss that is. Good job!

Nice entry, I kinda wish the ship had instant acceleration/deceleration like in pretty much all shmups, but it still plays relatively well! the music was quite enjoyable despite being loud!

First of all i wish if your game had a volume control option, The sounds were very loud.
The ship was facing the wrong direction! overall that was a good game don't hesitate to check mine!

@holdmeimscared @shp @djibess I am so sorry that the audio is so loud. It isn't really louder than anything else on my computer, so I never would have anticipated that problem.

Verry fun game, but the music was too loud and also I was unable to see the ship after the second level Started.

@gerox: I believe there's a bug where the ship will sometimes get stuck on the bottom of the screen. I have no idea for sure, as I never encountered it during the Compo, but while watching someone else play it some sort of problem like that did show up.

This is quite a nice little bullethell! My first reaction was like many's: THe sound is horribly loud. Even with y headphones being at 8% volume. Ears would have a shock there if they were on louder ^^;. The music and the mood is classical and really nice! What confused me most in the game was my own health. At first I was really cautious about not getting hit, but after a while it got really difficult, and, I realised that I don't have a healthbar displaying how well I do. I also realised that I could take very many bullets without dying and this made me push the limits. I think that the health rate seems good for being such a hard bullet hell after a few levels, but it also makes you think you can take too much. The problem is therefore the balance of difficulity and health in my opinion! (I mmight have missed something though but this is my impression) I gotta say it was a nice game though! I really got in the mood to blow up some spaceships! :)

I like the take on this, its not just your standard straight space shooter, with the walls coming in for no reason. Explaining the movement restriction adds some nice depth to the game. Audio, and graphics were nice, gave me a nice retro feel. Overall an enjoyable game.

Wow, what a fun game, but I'm exhausted now, I know you can simply hold space to shoot automatically but that has a timeout, by spamming space you don't have any delay which deals a lot more damage. For some reason when I got to the really big yellow ship I killed it but then for some reason the game just crashed, not sure if I accidently pressed a button or because I was running your game in Linux through Wine.

It worked very well otherwise and certainly rewarding when you are successful in a battle. Something which could have been useful is to get a percentage on the health for enemies and your own ship, because the visual damage was nice but it was hard to tell exactly how much health other enemies and your own ship had.

Great job overall, worked well on Linux too :smiley:

@linus : Thank you for the feedback! I know my games are prone to crashes, as my last one apparently crashed for one user too, but I've never seen a crash on my computer, so :shrug:

It really should be possible to do a native build for Linux, especially given that everything is actually written using pthreads versus a real cross-platform solution, but I simply never got around to figuring it out.

Health is certainly something that could be improved. The ships do, in fact, vary in max health, usually to make a level easier -- although most of the time, they are at their *maximum* max health. An extra health bar above every ship would probably improve the game quite a bit.

Nice entry! I like the way you use the theme of the LD and explained it. Nice retro-feel as well.

Your game has a lot of content, why is pretty enjoyable! :) I think the hitbox was a bit too small though, but I don't usually play bullet hell games so...?

Anyways, congrats on your game :)

Really nice game, but the boss is way too hard. With that basic laser there's no way I could beat it.

I played the game, it went well but I failed at the boss. The fixed size of the game screen makes it very small on my 4K display, but it was well playable. The music is a bit dissonant, but is a very catchy tune, fitting the game. The used instruments reminded me of playing Ultima VII, some color schemes you used even amplified that. I know this is a very odd thing to say comparing a space shooter to a story-driven RPG, but that was how it felt. On some screens the number and density of opponents was overwhelming, but since the ship is quite sturdy I survived through that screens by just firing as much as possible. Although the ship showed signs of damage I was missing a healthbar giving exact status about damage. I also had the feeling that the rotating green projectiles not always hit me dispite having touched me, probably the collision detection is a bit off here, but hard to say since it is a fast paced game most of the time. I'm sorry I cannot rate your game because I did not submit something this time.

@frodewin : I'm not sure what you mean by fixed size -- the game scales up when you scale the window up.

I'm glad you enjoyed the music. :slight_smile:

And yes, you're right with respect to collisions being off -- they're raytraced, but only in the vertical direction. So if a bullet comes at you with too much of a horizontal component, it won't hit you. (This also applies to your bullets hitting the enemy).