That sounds like a good idea. The Ice Beam is nearly useless right now, for reasons listed above; its only point in the game seems to be to pass that one spot in Taurus, and I found nowhere else where it was particularly useful/helpful in the game afterwards. Instant freezing ray (especially 8-way aimed) would make it vastly more useful - but it still might help to extend the freeze time a bit longer. ETA: Also, it still doesn't consume energy, like the Stun Beam does. Not sure if that was an intentional "upgrade" feature of the item.Re: Wall clinging and ice beam shenanigans
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So, then there's the ice beam. What if, instead of having a projectile shoot out, I had an instant-strike beam just flash across the screen and freeze the first thing it hit? I could code it to to that and to have 8-directional fire instead of 4. Would that make it more useful?
I invite your suggestions.
Also, is there any chance you could code the grappler so that firing it auto-picks up enemy item drops along its path? Like the boomerang, but without the pulling-the-item-back-to-you "enhancement," just the simple contact-acquisition style. This would make it somewhat more possible to grap drops before they fall off the screen, or grab wandering fairy hearts that you can't jump up to - excepting that obviously combos in the way would still prevent you from grabbing them. So if it's a simple fix and you're willing, do it; otherwise, don't worry about it.
Suggestion: It might streamline reporting/fixing various warp and continue bugs if you created a custom item (call it "bug report" or something) that simply displays the current DMAP/room and DMAP/room continue point on the subscreen - doesn't need to be fancy, just display the letters/numbers in a format you explain to the bugtesters. It would be helpful if you could store the previous room in a variable, and display that next to the current room location, so if you warp somewhere obviously wrong, you can see where you warped from and where you are, and report the exact locations, instead of "door in AREA COORDS warped me to spot X in cave room" or whatever. Item wouldn't need to be displayed in inventory, or obtainable on the map anywhere - just tell testers to cheat and add item to inventory.
ETA: Also, as far as polish - well, I gathered that you want to be done with it soon, for an "official" release, but it sounds like you're willing to continue working on and improving it afterwards. I would say, there are many aspects/areas of the game that could be improved and/or are somewhat out of balance, but basically, if you fix all the current bugs, nothing is so far out of balance that I would insist it needs fixing before releasing a 1.0. (Though I would still like to see the counter-intuitive subscreen cursor behavior/display cleaned up.) The game is still fun and I'd rate it 5 stars.
That's part of why I held off dumping a shitload of suggestions upon you, so you can just finish the game and get it out there. I figured I'd make all my suggestions (many of which would require considerable effort and testing to implement) for a future revision of the game. One of my ideas was tying the Zodiac boss's HP/damage rate and attack damage to your Sidearm level and your max HP/inventory, so that the earlier bosses, if skipped until later on, do not become trivially easy to defeat once you're at the "collect all 11" plot point. Another was limiting the Life Tank max and extending it throughout the game, so you can't end up with such a glut of them like I did. And I thought an upgrade that makes them activate automatically upon reaching a critically low HP would be neat - since that would eliminate annoying instances in shooter levels of dying after not using it in time / failing to notice you were about to die - and in a counter-intuitive way, it would also make the game somewhat more challenging, since auto-activation would force the player to be more careful while exploring without saving their previous progress, as using one up frivolously would force a choice to carry on and retain progress, or quit/retry to spare the wasted tank but lose any progress since the last save.
Of course, you still need to fix the 1+1=3 bug, so I'd worry about resolving that before screwing around with them any other way.
Suggestion: The cave rooms with multiple ? blocks, some of which spawn tons of enemies - is it possible to cause breaking one of the enemy ? blocks to trigger the door to "close" until they've all been killed? This would make that mechanic more effective, if the player can't simply leave the room after breaking an enemy box, come back in, try another, repeat until item box found.
Scorpio 1E: Sand blocks stay destroyed when you leave/return.
Scorpio 0D/1D: You can fall down on the right side and land in a solid combo.
Wall Climb bug: So I used it to climb up to the right side of Scorpio 3B from 4B, without the double-jump boots (just dash and high jump.) Without exploiting it again, I was able to gain access to 3C-D-E, 2-1-0D, and 0-1E. I could not reach the upper-right side of 0E, though I'm not ruling out using the bug to reach it somehow. The sand below makes jumping into the wall very tricky and tedious. All it gains access to is a Life Tank and the corridor with the 500-wallet.
Also, it looks like you changed Dash2 > Ring3 to Dash2 > SpinAttack > Ring3. Good idea. I got the Ring3 first last time, and it made everything else way too easy.
Gemini 63: Shop sells a key for 90.
Gemini 31: Not sure, but it seemed like my Sidearm didn't affect the switch. Had to strike it (with Scorpio Sting) to trigger it - the rest of the switches are all triggered by Sidearm bullets, yes?
Gemini 52/42: I know I mentioned before, that I was able to ascend here without the WCBs, but that was after I'd obtained the DJBs. I've tried to exploit the wall jump bug to get up here, without the DJBs, with no luck. But if it's possible to do so, then it's possible to reach many areas of this level without obtaining the Stun Beam. From 42 you can go 42-41-51-41-40 and proceed to the boss/item/switch at the top. You can also easily ascend from 42 to 32 by exploiting the wall jump bug, at which point you can access the entire top of the asteroid, up until 3C/2C. I think it's not possible to go farther that way; you could try jumping up into the left side of the L in 2C from the top of 3C, but I don't know that you'd be able to exploit the bug to hop over to the block and hop off the side of it to jump up on top of it. (ETA: I tried it, and seems impossible to exploit it here.) I know I was able to reach the door at Libra 25 without WCBs, by exploiting the bug, but I'm not sure, now, whether when I jumped off from the pillar and jumped off the side of the platform under the door and up onto it, whether I was exploiting the wall jump bug at the last step or simply hit the upper corner of the block right to product the normal little hop those corners give you. At any rate, if memory serves, the Grappler is at Gemini 64, which is behind fish eggs, so it's not possible to obtain it without the Stun Beam. ETR: A bunch of nonsense about completing Leo w/out Grappler, because I forgot you need it to reach the Leo entrance in Aries.
Gemini 04: LOL, I killed Iron way early again. This time, instead of rushing off the screen, it looked like he turned black, then disappeared, and then it warped to the cutscene/dialog. In case it matters, my strategy (both times now, that he's checked out early) has been to jump up, to get him to jump up high, and then maneuver underneath him and shoot upwards with my Sidearm. I was expecting to sink a tank or two into this fight, but I think I knocked off about a third of his health and was only down to half of mine when the fight ended. Also, that Life Tank in GE00, can you move it? Nothing is more obnoxious that placing items you can max out along a path you must traverse. I had 9 when I reached that room, and tried to dash/jump over it. No luck, so I wasted it. Also, when I triggered Iron's endfight cutscene, I was standing over the blocks in the center. So as soon as his dialog ended, I fell down out of the cutscene room without warping back to the proper Gemini 04 room. I ended up in a black/no-gravity room, which I could walk back up into his cutscene and read his dialog again, then fall back down, repeat. (C-Dawg only knows where else I could've walked to from it...) Finally I figured out (before F6ing, thankfully) that if I simply lined myself up with the left wall in the room above for a wall ascent, I could walk up into the cutscene room and spam L as the message ended (not sure if L mattered, or just placement) and pop up out of the pit, which allowed me to move to the left and trigger warping back into the proper room.
Scorpio Sting: Another weapon that fires funny on room borders. On the right border, aiming up/down, the bullet immediately disappears (since it's swerving offscreen immediately.) On the left border, aiming up/down, it arcs once to the right and back before disappearing. Presumably it does something similar on the top/bottom rows, though the infrequency of standing on the bottom row makes that rather inconsequential. Of course, it fires normally when aimed into the room from either left/right border.
Gemini 65: Gate is purple, opening/opened doors are orange. After defeating the boss in 64, when I walk left into 64 from 65, the gate and doors are purple. After a second, the doors turn orange.
Edited by newstarshipsmell, 30 January 2015 - 03:55 PM.
