Yeah, 8 directional keys. I mapped movement to WASD and shooting to 8456. I kept trying to hit 7,9,1 and 3 for shooting diagonally lol
roguelike brain
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Damn, wish I had a solution for you – I’m out of PICO-8 buttons lol.
Acutally maybe I could hack in a special control scheme in the JS layer that defaults numpad 7913 to diagonal shots. It wouldn’t be remappable, but that would get around my “out of buttons” problem.
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Yeah, I’m aware it was a platform limitation. The controls are fine and I’m just a baby
Dig out or borrow an Xbox-like controller from someone if you can – that’s my preferred way to play.
My friend reported his Pro Controller for Switch worked out of the box with it, so that’s neat. Browsers have much better controller support than I expected.
Fun game!
Using the defrag ability on areas with thick debris and seeing that clean black square is so satisfying to me. The pace at which the Defrag ability collects shots also made shooting feel more engaging. The Cloak and Remote Backup abilities are very useful, but I didn’t use them much. I only felt like using Defrag while in the thick of it.
The initiative you’re given before the enemies finish spawning and the temporary invincibility when they do was nice, thank you. Dying feels like a tragedy when you have 3 power, but is bittersweet when you’re broke.
Server 6 is my favorite part so far, but I like the enemies that pull the screen the most. The only complaint I have is that the difficulty ramps up too quickly in a way that felt pretty odd at first.
High score is 281 at the moment.
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Yeah I think my main (mostly related) regrets with this game are
- controls are complicated, especially when people aren’t guaranteed to be using a controller, and it’s not obvious to use a controller with a web game
- difficulty curve is high and the game is paced in a way that feels harsh for new players
- powerups take tutorializing to understand and the game is balanced such that it requires good usage of them pretty quickly
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@Thenar (or any others) – let me know how the “easier” difficulty feels to you. Is it a smoother curve? Are there still large difficulty jumps? What levels give you trouble?
I think the next Pico-8 release is going to have global highscore tables, and I’ll likely update this game to support them. I think I may make something closer to the “easier” mode the default mode, and then players can jump to the harder mode when easier ramps up too slowly for them, but I don’t have much feedback on easier right now (and I think it’s not highlighted well enough in the menu for players to change that value when they’re having trouble).
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In addition to highlighting the easier mode, I might include an insane mode or a timed mode or something. My games are getting too long on normal.
This game took 15 minutes! Although I suspect it gets like inhumanly hard by like stage 50 or 60. Half my deaths were in levels 40-42. Definitely the farthest I’ve gotten.
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I checked out the easier difficulty and reached server 17 on the first try. It was definitely smoother, but I still prefer the normal difficulty. I think the most noticeable difficulty jump on normal is server 3.
High score on normal is 371 now, I saw the polka dotted square for the first time. I like all the enemies so far except the birds.
I also had a bit of fun with slime world mode.
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No high scores this week. I checked out the shuffle mode this time, was nice to be able to mix things up! The randomized order of the beginning stages were another thing I loved about Gunbird.
I noticed that I have difficulty pacing my shots while defrag is collecting fire power. It feels like I should just be shooting while defrag is doing its thing, but I sometimes want to save that fire power for later. I wish I could tap the shooting direction to use the normal shot and hold the direction for some fraction of a second to use the extra shots.
Next time I’m going to use the other powers, my issue with the defrag power made me realize what a significant part of the game I’ve been neglecting.
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