loren schmidt

it would decrease the offensive utility of being able to move freely and would also make sustaining the beam via multitasking harder, but would be a really fun mess and might have great emergent properties. it would probably be too disruptive to be able to attract enemy projectiles, but that's fun..

a weird variant i have an idea for: the beam actually magnetically attracts (some of?) your bullets on the x axis, and if you stay close to it it will redirect your fire at the point where you put the beam.

the beam has a fairly high start cost, but can be sustained relatively cheaply. so you /can/ pulse it, which gives it some flexibility vs. smaller targets, but it's most efficient vs. larger foes. the beam cannot damage things behind you, but it does work moderately well for punishing pursuers.

i have a prototype of the beam secondary weapon working! i wanted to make this before i add some larger enemies in the game.

the beam locks in place during longer bursts, allowing you to move freely and multitask.

i've never actually read any Clark Ashton Smith!

ha compelling. i probably do want to put some homing missiles with huge trails in the game...

and the ratios are telling, but there really are gems in there. hypercard. Bill Williams games and Apple Town Monogatari and hand made web 1.0 pages and Robot Odyssey. along modern glimpses of similar things, like pico8 or bitsy.

i appreciate that sentiment. i think i tend to be only able to engage with nostalgia critically and at some distance for the same reasons. but the good parts of that really are one of the ways people have of glimpsing how technology actually can be humanistic.

oh nice, the placeholder weapon spawns are working, i can put them in the actual game now.

thanks, they ended up more like creatures than initially planned! i'm planning to develop them further and / or do variants.

question for people who do development in firefox:

i'm confused about the refresh hotkey is disabled while in the debugger? are you really expected to close the dev tools, refresh, open dev tools again? i don't understand why they'd do that, it's so clunky.

i added weapon pickups (with placeholder generated art). next i'm going to prototype a new secondary weapon. i think the beam would be nice to do next, because it's very different.

i added a placeholder scrolling background

oh my god

live coding one of the new primary weapons. net result: i don't know if i like the rolling spawn points (a shorter phase might work?) and i changed radius from 2.160 to 2.230.

p.s. there's still no generated player ship art, but there will be soon! prioritizing some other things.

i started replaying 1 and i'm enjoying it.

possibly! i will likely run into this when doing art too.

for example, you could fire the glaive at a larger target on the right, then go left to deal with a group of enemies. you could use the heat generated by firing + the kill bonus from the smaller enemies to repeat-hit the larger enemy with the glaive. i'll test this out in the near future.

this wouldn't be enough to completely refocus the combat system, but the supplementary resources could be enough to create some fun to learn advanced strategies.

by design, "heat" is generated per primary shot fired, rather than per kill. the intent is that you will have a flow of resources in situations where you have fewer, larger targets.

but i'm considering having a small supplementary bonus of heat per kill (and possibly per unit of damage to bosses).

like all secondary weapons, the glaive consumes "heat": about 3/5 of a bar, i this case. i'm considering adding an ability to chain-fire it /without/ it returning to you if you have enough energy for a second shot.

i like the dramatic anticipation, the patter of moment to moment decisions this makes. and it's also nice that it gives you some limited ability to deal with threats behind you, complementing forward-firing primary weapons like this one.

as promised, here's a video + some design notes on one of the secondary weapons i've been prototyping: the glaive.

it's a single rotating blade which automatically targets the nearest enemy. it will do a chunk of damage to anything, but it can one shot any class 1 enemy.

i would assume it's not hard coded? this seems like the sort of thing which would be in the settings somewhere.

i like the analog movement with a gamepad a lot! but non-locked combat and free aim are really nice with mouse + keyboard.

i usually do use vscode for c++ or c# based projects though!

(this editor is sublime)

right now this and my primary project are both js based, and i am doing the minimalist thing and using a text editor with the built in browser debuggers

oh nice! historical details like that are fascinating.