Instructions

Controls

• Arrow keys to move
• X to progress dialog
• Z to shoot cherry bombs

Shooting bullets is automatic.

Some enemies drop cherries. Press Z to shoot out a cherry bomb using your cherries. The more cherries, the more powerful the bomb. Save up 10 cherries to heal or gain points.

Full Gameplay Video

Change Log

For the basic shmup showcase, I wanted to take the end result from the tutorial and see where I would naturally develop the game from there if I were the developer. Thus, I am calling this version of the game Cherry Bomb V2, but credit for 90% of the assets (including sprites, music, and code) goes to the people who contributed to the tutorial's version of the game.

Some of the changes I made include:

• I added 2 new bosses, for a total of 3 (1 every 3 waves).

• The bosses now have dialog and drop cherries when changing phases, giving you an opportunity to heal or use cherry bombs against them.

• The laser shoots automatically so you don't have to hold down a button the whole time. This allows you to better focus on aiming, dodging, collecting cherries, and shooting cherry bombs.

• You get a 1-up and points for completing each wave.

• Cherries leftover at the end of the game give points.

• The player has two different hitboxes now: a small one for colliding with enemies and enemy bullets, and a large one for colliding with cherry pickups.

• I designed some original waves for this version of the game.

• I added stats to the end screen.

• The stars turn into lines when changing waves so it looks like you're flying really quickly. Also, the stars move faster as the game goes on.

• The player ship is larger, and the game runs at 60 FPS instead of 30, so I had to balance the timing and spacing of things to accommodate these changes.

• I gave the player ship a small acceleration/deceleration when moving. Also, it accelerates slower when "speeding up" (moving up the screen) and faster when "slowing down" (moving down the screen), with changes to the ship's flame to reflect this.

• I added some new frames to the turning animation for the ship, making it look smoother.

• I changed the draw order of some elements for visual clarity.

• I modified assets from the tutorial to match a red/blue/yellow color palette with a flat-shaded style.

• I added some other small visual effects, like fading, health bars, text that drops in/flies away, etc.

My Thoughts

There were a lot of things I added to this game more for the sake of experimenting than to actually improve the game. I had a lot of fun seeing what challenges I could put on myself (like putting in a dialog system), but, if I were to develop this into a final package to be sold, there's a few things I would change (other than the obvious, A.K.A. making entirely original graphics and levels):

• I wanted to implement some acceleration/deceleration just to try it and to see if I could make the ship look cooler by having the flame's level change depending on how "fast" you're moving. As it turns out, people really, really do not like inertia in shmups. Whoops.

• I don't think it makes much sense in this game to reset the player's location when they take damage. It seems to just add to the chaos of the game, and not in a good way. The generous invulnerability frames I gave the player should be enough to get them out of danger after taking damage, so I think resetting the location would only make sense if everything got reset when the player takes damage, like if the level started over completely. Having your location change suddenly against your will while in the middle of being attacked is just jarring.

• The second boss fight is just okay. The most fun mechanic in the game, shooting, is taken away (again, mostly because I just wanted to try out coding something new), and I think that really puts a damper on things. I tried to make the fight much shorter than the other boss fights by lowering the bosses' HP, but the fight really drags if you kill one of the guys long before the other one since it takes forever to collect cherries with only one of them on screen. Honestly, it depends a lot on RNG if it's going to be fun or not. If you get a good balance of cherries and the two red guys aren't super in sync with their movements, I think the fight can be somewhat fun, but it really drags when they both move in sync and drop cherries in sync and only drop 1-2 cherries every time. Not to mention the randomness of the little red guys they explode into. In retrospect, I think something that makes boss fights so fun is that they tend to follow a pattern, which allows you to learn the pattern and dance around their attacks, making you feel like a clever ninja. The second boss fight lacks this feeling.

• While I like my dialog system as is, it would have been cool to weave an actual story into this game. I'm not much of a writer, so I just wrote up some quick lines of dialog to give the bosses a little personality, but I do wish I had given the dialog more purpose in the game, like slowly revealing something to the player, so they don't find out the full story until they defeat the final boss. I think that would make progressing and winning feel especially rewarding.