Reach For The Stars! - A Goofy Arcade Shoot Em' Up Game

devlogs
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I’ve been working on this game for a while, with a break while my laptop got fixed, I haven’t played any Shoot Em’ Ups but I got the idea to make a “quick” and “simple” game to release on Newgrounds in-between working on another game a while back, that game has been like the seventh one left on the shelf. The concept started as a shoot em’ up arcade game that felt like it had weight in its movement, and enemies that spawn in waves from right to left with you trying to stop them otherwise you’d be harmed because it was the most simple and effective thing to program at the time.
untitled
here’s some early footage of the game
after a while of adding enemies I didn’t actually really have any vision for the game so I decided to make a level manager for a story mode with preset waves for levels and bosses at the end of them, with the excuse of “the story mode being a tutorial making the arcade mode able to be immediately interesting” (which doesn’t make that much sense). designing levels was really boring since the waves were just stored in a JSON that was an array of arrays . This changed a lot of the physics for the enemies to be less focused on being able to juggle and manage them, and more on directly attacking them, which wasn’t very fun, although to compensate I did add a good risk/reward mechanic where defeating enemies with more damage than necessary gives more points. Development slowed down a bunch because I didn’t have anything fun/good to do. Until my laptop’s battery inflated, and I made a Fox Pac-Man game with my old laptop which I’ll work on after this one.

After my laptop got fixed, I started working on this game again and scrapped the whole story mode, focusing entirely on arcade gameplay with different modes for more content. If I could start over maybe I would prefer to make the game have actual levels with stage hazards and different sections having different pools of waves (gehehe, water. ) you need to fight to get points to progress, but I don’t want to spend 6 extra months on just this probably. So I’ll just add 5-8 modes with different enemy pools and gimmicks, I think I’ll vaguely try to replicate dicey dungeons with its episode system, with getting a set score in each mode being part of a whole experience but still being replayable by themselves (although I’ll sacrifice some cohesion with replayability since I really think only the bonus rounds in dicey dungeons are worth replaying (and that’s kind of intentional (but whtever grumblemumble)))

here is a post with some gameplay from the second fun mode, for it the enemies are replaced with more combat appropriate versions, which I finished quite quickly although school will probably slow me down somewhat, though I’ll have an excuse to brainstorm instead of procrastinating because I have nothing planned to do.
here’s the array with the names of the other modes
[“NO FUN”,“WAR”,“BOOTUP”, “ANGRY MOB”,“GHOSTS”,“DODGY”, “SPAMMY”]
it might include “BURNS”

I wonder what I’ll even do for music

Thanks for Reading! Reader ! /ytp
:gms_explosion:

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Looks cool, the enemies remind me of Kid Icarus. Why is Mario there?

It’s interesting that you decided to make a game in a genre you haven’t played. How did you settle on a design for it?

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Mario first appeared as a sprite test for the pixel smoothing shader I’m using he just stays there during development getting wider every time I record the game, I feel like those types of shaders are overhated. They aren’t “objectively” good and don’t work for most games but they have a special sort of like gooey/clayey style I’ve always liked.
I technically do have some basic shoot 'em up experience but it’s from small parts of other games like Spamton NEO’s fight in Deltarune; I tried to play some other shoot ‘em ups but I didn’t really like any of them, although I recently played Platypus’ demo and I liked it.
I settled on a design by just trying to make something fun for myself in a single room by continuously spawning enemies and fighting them.