Astro Vulpus (Still Dead) Aug 02

[AcetheSuperVillain]

ASTRO VULPUS

Click to Play
(Javascript Required)

astrovulpus_v05.swf [ 5.09 MiB | Viewed 4942 times ]

A harem parody of Star Fox, meaning all characters except the lead have been turned into females, and everyone is fucked.



Controls:

Use the mouse to move. Shooting is automatic. Move the mouse really far to do a barrel roll. You can't shoot while barrel rolling but you are immune to damage. Click the mouse to charge up shots. Press WASD to summon girls (currently just S or D). Sometimes the game will lose focus when you start up a level, making the keys useless. Just click on the game to game focus again and the keys will come back.

Jan 25: Various minor balancing tweaks. 3D graphics for the girls' ships, new graphics for player shots. Preloader, AceSV spash screen, porn warning, fadeouts. Made changes to the annoying jungle background. Changed most of the BGMs. Girl ships will follow you around if you hold down their summon button. You can pause with P or Shift. Animations won't pause, and the game as is doesn't have a "just pressed" checker, so it might toggle pause/unpause rapidly. All of these are things I could fix, but really don't want to, the obvious solution would be to just not let you pause it ever, except during blit games. (which this is not)

Previous Updates:

Spoiler (click to show/hide):

Jan 19: All enemies except the boss on Mission 3 have 3D prerender sprites now. There is also a 3D scrolling background. Upped the size from 4.7kb to 11.2kb, might need to go easy on those...

Jan 6: Very minor update, mainly just throwing in some preview graphics.

There is now a Patreon link. If LoK blocks the direct link in the upper right corner, you can copy the url from the Credits button.

Renard's 3D ship is ready to go, and there will be a quick demo of what final reward CG quality should look like.

I have done some minor tweaks to the combat system since last time. Girls will follow your ship closer than before. The boss will drop hearts at intervals based on how much damage you do, so you can restore some health in the middle of the fight.

Due to technical problems, I am unable to complete this game in Flash. This project will be replaced with a non-parody rewrite in Unity. Read from here to know why.

Here is a link to the 3D reward CG I made for Astro Vulpus (which is what crashes Flash), since that is quickly getting buried: viewtopic.php?f=34&t=7484&start=60#p618978



Hey! Listen!

I've got a few different ideas of things I could do next. Vote for your favorite:
viewtopic.php?f=28&t=7994

[Yorozuya]

Since I've played this for like an hour or so, I guess I'll chip in.

As far as using the squad, would you consider something like the classic 'bomb' style in bullet-hell games instead of summoning helpers for a limited time? You could have each helper doing something like a screen-wipe attack or heavy-damage narrow laser or protection shield etc, although I do find that the gameplay you have right now can lead to some interesting implementations. Another thing is to account for the difficulty, you could instead limit it so only one or two helpers can be present simultaneously... or maybe that was not your intention?

On another note, I think you should do something about friendship points healing you. Once you've upgraded the squad summoning amount enough times, you might end up using them to spawn hearts from dead enemies to heal you, every single time, and this would take away the challenge. Granted, there's not much challenge to see right now, and you may be putting in more insane things later, but that's how I see it for now.

As of right now, I don't think the idea of charged shot is necessary, because we're too much focused on dodging / hunting your enemies anyways. Would it be possible to make the playing field bigger? i.e. reduce the size of both us and the enemies. That way you can have more space to move about, more entry points for enemies, and also more time to plan your actions and thus make charged shots worth using.

Now about summon length, I think it would make more sense to tie this into friendship levels instead of you upgrading them with points. It also gives incentive for players to actually summon the helpers. But on another note, I find that having to move your ship all over the place to collect friendship points are quite distracting from the main objective of shooting the enemies. What do you think about friendship points being put on automatic collection instead of the player manually collecting them? And is this related to attraction points that we can upgrade? Because I've tried upgrading that 4 times from the base level, and I don't think I see much improvement...

That's all for now I think.

[AcetheSuperVillain]

Okay, I managed to get a bunch of work done today.

So I did include the charge shot after all. Added the sound system. Changed summon length to be friendship based instead of purchase based. Added Slick. Added a bunch of enemies from Ace Invaders, including a simple boss. Changed the shots to automatically attract towards you, which means I need to think of something else for Jewelia's power ups to do.

@Yorozuya, I did consider using bomb-style summons, but I felt like that would make a less unique game. I think there's also a nice mental component to interacting with the girls in combat rather than just fire-and-forget that will make them feel more alive as the game gets developed further. I might limit it to one or two helpers at a time, but I do like it when games have a really crazy feeling, so my instinct is that if having too many girls makes it too easy, better to make the enemies harder than the girls weaker.

I'm not sure about making the game bigger. Changing the screen resolution at this point would be a major undertaking. Making everything on stage smaller would also involve a lot of speed tweaking, but I am going to replace all the combat graphics with 3D renders eventually anyways, so it's not out of the question. I think I want to get more of a sense of how the late-game will feel before deciding that.

The original attract stat was supposed to upgrade slowly, because once you reach a certain amount, you just don't need more. I think what I'd rather have for something like that is a one-time purchase to add an attractor to your ship, but I don't know how I fit that into the current system.

[Yorozuya]

Played it again, and I think overall everything is better. The charged shot is working out very well, as opposed to my expectation. I forgot how it was in the first version, but this one seems to have a decently sized playing field now. The renewed attraction rate for those hearts are also quite decent, I don't think you need to modify it anymore though that's up to you and anyone else who'd also give their input.

When you consider one-time purchase bonuses and whatnot, it seems to me that the answer is already in your blueprint for the game. If you wanna have an actual plot, with girls being unlocked one by one eventually, why not have each girl unlock new features along with their arrival? For example you could have the first girl be a weapon specialist, since she can upgrade your rate of fire and all. Then when you get the second girl, she's an engine specialist, upgrading your speed and whatnot. The downside of this concept is that, until you unlock more girls and ergo more upgrades, you have to limit the difficulty so as to not overwhelm the player.

Anyways, as an alternative upgrade idea to replace attraction rate, I can think of ship defense, ship firepower, or barrel roll invincibility duration, though I'm not sure if you want to modify those variables. How about something to do with getting more points per kill, or retaining a portion of your points if you die?

[AcetheSuperVillain]

Thanks for the input. Some good ideas I'll have to think about.

So I wouldn't add a "defense" stat to a scrolling shooter because that would be exactly the same thing as maximum HP, just increases the number of hits you can take. I'm not wild about the idea of just increasing the damage that your shots do, that strikes me as boring. I could do upgrades that affect your gun like increasing the size of shots so they are more likely to collide with things, increasing the number of shots fired at one time, adding an extra type of shot, like a missile attack or side gun, increasing the maximum charge of your charge gun, increasing the spread effect of the charge gun, increasing the size/speed/etc of charged shots, etc.

But ultimately, I do like the idea of keeping the shooter game relatively simple. A high degree of in-depth gameplay there would probably be in the way.

[Lucky777]

I'm exceedingly tired, so I'll keep this uncharacteristically monosyllabic - may come back and write more things later after reading the whole thread.

"I clicked on it because Astro Vulpus sounded kinda like Star Fox, and I love Star Fox.
Amusing to see that was the aim of the title.
As to this game, I like it too.
Neat how the ships the girls shoot turn into health-ups if those ships get shot down, either by you or the girls.
Not a fan of mouse controls ever though."

Also the music's kinda neat though some portions of it grate on my ears a little bit.


EDIT:

Okay, woke up, played a bit more, beat the final available boss, and these are my thoughts:

1: You're clearly not ACTUALLY immune to damage while barrel-rolling; I got hit 100% of the time by the energy blasts.
Seems to work on collision damage though.
I'd fix that or change the move's description, but if it stays this way it's an interesting reversal of the real barrel-roll: weak to energy NOT phys, instead of vice versa.

2: It might be nice to be able to plan where the ships go when you summon them or something.
Instead or better yet in addition, it might be nice to be able to choose where they go AFTER you summon them.
Far too often I summon them and they bounce around harmlessly.

3: Idea's still pretty cool overall, and it's neat just how much firepower your allies actually pack.
I like how Slippy-fem upgrades your armour; maybe make Jewellia power-up your shots?
I've nothing against a plain power-increase, but she could add penetration or whatever.

Still hatin' the mouse controls because fuck mouse controls.
Oh also: Frog with hair maybe plox.
I'm actually fine with how Slick looks, but ENTIRELY regardless of furry logic on reptiles etc, I always prefer chicks with head-hair over bald girls.

[AcetheSuperVillain]

So, retail nightmare season is finally over, I'm off to Oklahoma to visit family, I should be back to work on Astro Vulpus sometime next week. Just so I don't forget, next thing I want to do is add more levels, add pause and save, change some of the movement methods to trigonometry vectors instead xspeed,yspeed. The last one should give things a more natural feeling movement and paves the way for homing shots, if I want to do that.

@Lucky777

The thing with the barrel rolling, it's not the animation that makes you immune to shots, there's a little variable that turns on if the ship is a certain distance away from the mouse. When the variable turns on, it starts the barrel roll animation, the animation stops when it reaches the end, not necessarily when the ship is close enough to the mouse to turn off the immunity variable. So, noted, I'll think about cleaning that up in the future. I have been thinking of making it so that barrel rolling only works on shots, not collisions, but I do like the complete ape-shit power trip. Right now, there is actually no distinction between shots and ships. They are basically firing little ships that look like lasers.

As for directing the girl ships, the original version, which you narrowly missed, had them follow the mouse like the player ship does, but that was really awkward, especially when grabbing the friendship drops. Right now the girls will not stray more than 400 pixels away from the player ship (or the mouse, can't remember which) or half the screen width. I could decrease this a bit so they stay closer. I could also maybe have something happen when press their summon button, since they don't do anything at the moment. I'm open to suggestions. I do worry that this would be too many controls to think about in a pinch. Also, as you upgrade the girls' weapons, they tend to cover more of the screen, so this is something that improves as you level up.

As for the mouse, I don't plan on changing it. After years of programming keyboard brawlers and alloy tengu games, I'm enjoying the novelty of analog control. At the moment, I'm in love with the idea of making harem parodies, so future parodies may have keyboard only controls, depending on the need.

[Yorozuya]

Huh... and here I thought the barrel roll makes your hitbox vanish for a short while.

Anyways, I think one factor that some people don't like about the squad summoning system is the random placement of the girls, and therefore lack of control to make them useful. Maybe you can just fix their place in relation to the primary ship? Like, let's say Pepper always settles to a position 60 degrees to your front-left, Harriet 60 degrees to your front-right, Slick is directly to your left, and Jewelia directly to your right. Or it doesn't have to be by the assistant's identity, it can be by the order it's summoned, etc etc.

Another idea is to make them like the vanguard+dread=vandread system (old anime reference), wherein you summon your assistant, she transforms your ship and now you can do more powerful things with them, like more speed, more defense, more power, along with modifying your attack pattern to something unique. I'd imagine when you summon all 4 squadmates and transform into one badass-mofo ship, you'll still get the same insane level of firepower you were hoping, albeit with significantly more control since there's basically still only one ship under your command.

[Lucky777]

Hmm.
So the animation continues although the immunity is gone.
Okay, that might have been what was happening to me.

I might also have been just GETTING SHOT before the barrel roll begain, and then assuming "oh I got shot in the barrel roll" since the animations are the same.

I think it's the former though, because I've barrel rolled through shots when I'd clearly already started spinning, and still gotten hit.

[Dead2112man]

Funny thing is, we are not doing real Barrel rolls, these are ari ... ara ..... forget it, Star Fox just used the wrong name and it is stuck in are heads forever.

[napala]

aerion... I think, or something like that

[KageTheHard]

Aileron rolls is the one you're looking for.

But so far I like it, indeed the fixed positions would make sense and give it a more cohesive feel when using the summons.

[AcetheSuperVillain]

So I now have a 3D ship doing an aileron roll instead of a donut. I also recorded the ship doing something more like a barrel roll, but it's really visually chaotic to move the ship like that. At some point, I will have an option for you to play either the aileron roll animation or the barrel roll animation, but for now, you're stuck with ailerons.

[Lucky777]

Speaking for myself, I prefer Aileron rolls visually.

GENUINELY kind of amusing that at least one generation first learned the wrong terminology for that manouver, from Starfox, but that is what it is.

I like the new ship, and the new animations, and especially the visible difference between getting hit and barrel rolling now.

Reward picture-quality is also looking pretty fucking boss.

Apart from looking forward to SOMETHING like a summon-placement system, I'm just looking forward to "the rest of the game" at this point.

[Ekoj]

Hi. I really enjoy playing your game.
This is the only one H-sidecsrolling shooter I know, and that is a super cool idea.

I'm looking forward to more arts and levels

[AcetheSuperVillain]

So I think it's going to be easier for me to knock out all of one kind of thing at a time, so it'll be ships, ships, ships, ships, ships, ships for a while. But don't worry, you can totally jack off to these:

Spoiler (click to show/hide):

[Ekoj]

Nice looking ship designs ^^

[AcetheSuperVillain]

Update. More 3D graphics, including a 3D scrolling background.

Also, Patreon keeps bugging me to tell you when I post stuff, so here's a reminder that patrons can see a behind-the-scenes video of me making Renard's ship and the new scrolling background. https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4787605

[suijin]

Might just be me, but the backgrounds are pretty distracting and often make it harder to see what's on screen (I keep worrying that I'm gonna run into a tree or something). Maybe try something a little less hectic/eye catching?

[AcetheSuperVillain]

It's not just you. I've been playing around with it.

Here's a preview of the updated version, with dumbed down colors:

bg_jungle_preview2.gif (2.17 MiB) Viewed 5060 times

However, I don't feel like I'm going to crash into it, just that it's distracting. But if that's the case for you, I could try adding some sort of fog layer between the action and the trees, that should make it look more removed. Also, I probably won't make this the first background you meet in the game, I'd start you off with something more spacey, maybe that would help you get used to not worrying about the background.