Bullet Hell

I was reminiscing about my learning days when I made my first top down shooter. The idea was the longer you stayed alive the better your weapons got. With your multiplier and a running total of your current score that would append to your total score whenever you died and a highest life score next to the current and totals so you could see how you're doing. As you would progress you'd earn an unlock then press a hotkey for a type of upgrade of your choosing. You could get an additional bullet for every shot, a wider spread of your existing shots, more power per shot, or upgrade one bullet to a higher class. These higher classes went from standard to armor piercing to setting enemies on fire, etc. If you managed to stay alive long enough all you had to do was sit still and keep shooting and no enemy could ever get close to you, it was a little broken. Turns out though that there's a name for that type of shooter called bullet hell. The idea is that you have so many bullets on screen at once constantly wiping out everything. Now I'm seriously considering doing a remake.

Though I'm also laying ground work for a backstory mini game for the main game, independent it'll function as a loose pretense for the world you get dropped into. It's kinda based on the firestarter gameboy game from way back in the day. Essentially you have an endlessly growing city you must destroy to keep it from consuming the world. Igniting 4 science research facilities triggers the zombie apocalypse and isolating the city to an island and destroying all land around it and building a wall of ruble by destroying buildings is the only way to win. As you progress you get support from the UN and get better firepower to destroy stronger buildings. So you start with matches, then gasoline, then napalm, c4, etc. The idea is to keep the city alive but stop it from spreading outwards. Destroying it all makes you lose as does letting it consume the world. It was a simple and elegant game that I remember fondly.

The side note for the post: Realm of the mad god is supposedly a bullet hell game and it's quite fun, check it out.

On to the question of the day, what would you like to pay for a mini game? I always prefer free but I also know that if I'm always that cheap the guys like me that make what I like to play won't be able to make what I like anymore so I give them a few dollars and tell them to get back to work. Games like geometry wars and super stardust HD I was happy with my $4 spent, I'd have even given $6 but $8 I might have passed on. Some times a mini game gets overpriced and I end up not getting it or hating that I got it leading me to hate the game itself even if I otherwise would've liked it. I honestly hadn't thought of what I might price the mini game for until now and I'm not sure if I want to go crazy and just put it up for $1 and throw it at every device and market hoping for the best or focus down on specific platforms and go for $4 to $5 a copy to make up for the fewer sales.

Last but not least I'm going to spell out the secret for you. It was the Konami Code. Press up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A and a popup will appear, the secret message has been changed because apparently nobody figured it out or didn't want in on the beta, anyway now you know something about the blog that may come in handy in the future as I'll periodically update the message and may even give you tips on new secrets through it. If you want the code to add to your blog I'll post it in the comments here after someone requests.

Edit: apparently I didn't make it clear that I'm talking about using the keyboard here. Use the arrow keys to enter the sequence up up down down left right left right and the on the regular part of the keyboard press b then a without the shift or caps lock though I'm not sure if they'd make a difference anyway just don't bother. Having done this you'll see a question, whenever you see a question or want to comment about it just write something in the comments of the most recent post. Once again using the arrow keys between the number pad area and the majority of the keyboard, below the special function keys insert, delete, home, end, pgup,pgdn with those 4 keys that kind of have arrow symbols on them press up up down down left right left right then on the main part of the keyboard the b key between v and n below g and then the a key between caps lock and s below q and above z

up up down down left right left right b a

this isn't for the majority of you visitors, it's for the exceptionally thick ones that thought I was talking about the old nintendo controller somehow in relation to my blog.