KAZESUI'S PROFILE

author=narcodis
A difficulty setting might be in order... or perhaps make it like Gradius, and have a secret code you can enter during the level select screen to give the player 30 lives or something.

Already a step ahead of you.
since the last update, there are already 3 secret codes implemented (which is what caused the slow down bug you noticed as well).
One of these instantly gives you 9 lives, another a full upgrade of a random weapon, and the last one blows you up.

The issue now is only figuring out how I want to reveal them. The original plan was to implement difficulty settings, and reveal one code for beating each of the different difficulties, but revealing them sooner might be an idea as well. Still thinking about it

Then I bet you're looking forwards to stage 3, which is even more difficult

Seems my update came a day too late. Several of the issues you've raised have been fixed, like the wall you hit too early, it's something that got broken while I was working on level 3 so it took some time to notice it. This makes it possible to kill the turret you mentioned, but shouldn't be attempted without some weapon upgrades. The basic idea of that one (and few other instances) was "to live and let live".

The score also gives you an extra life for each 5000 points now, and you're provided with a savefile which let's you enter stage 1 directly through the level select.

Also, yes if you complete a stage with just 1 life, you will be given another one at the beginning of the next stage... which means you'll have 2 lives... which might only be marginally better. (Apparently there was a poor schmock who finished the first level with only one life).

The main gripe about it being rather difficult is still very much intact though, just hopefully a bit less of a chore.

I find you raise a pretty interesting point about the life system possibly being obsolete. Didn't cross my mind as they are or were pretty typical in these kind of games. One of the only things it does at the moment is to make sure that you won't run out of useable power ups too soon.

Thanks for the review, and the time you spent trying to beat it, eventhough my strong tendency of making stuff too hard

Thanks for the congratulations people.

The sprites (apart from minor easy stuff like bullets) are mostly Gradius III rips. For now I can only wish to get that good at making sprites myself.

I teach math as a part time job, so yeah, I'm fairly good at it. There's not too much advanced math used in this game though. A bit of trigonometry for figuring out the angle from enemy to the player ship, as well as for the direction of the bullet, utilizing that x² + y² = radius of a circle to determine if the ship is within range of the explosion, and using quadratic regression to generate a lookup table for the explosion range. And aside from that, it's mostly just a bunch of plain + and - and maybe a bit of modulo as well.

And no, I don't have any code from gradius or any other game for that matter. All the code for this game was generated by me. Would probably have been hard to find anything usable from other places as well, since it would have to made to especially fit rm2k3.

I've also already made a simple pixel based platformer for Befuddle Quest 5, and I will admit that I've been playing around with thoughts about making something Turrican-esque. No idea if I will do anything about it though.

As for how I do this, all it takes to find out is to open the game in the maker and watch the many lines of code, and guess what the different variables do since I don't comment a lot