Pop-shoot: Synthwave styled space shooter, inspired by 80s arcades

Nice little game. If your inspiration is Japanese '80s arcade shooters, it's worth taking a close look at them (and their 90s and 2000s sequels) to understood how they held the player's attention. A mistake I see in this game and many other Western shmups is giving the enemies too much health. Slowly chipping away at bad guys gets boring, usually the rule in these games is that small enemies die in 1-2 hits and larger enemies live just long enough to test whether you can evade their pattern of fire. The challenge comes more from weathering swarms of enemies than from any individual foe. Displaying lifebars above non-boss enemies is a sign it takes too long to destroy them. The pacing of arcade games is also instructive; levels usually last just a couple minutes and the enemy patterns are constantly varying.

Other than that the music and aesthetics are great, though there is some funny aliasing of sprites and JPEG artifacts in the backgrounds. The key to this kind of aesthetic is a crisp look.

Very cool. My only suggestion is to change the color of the enemy shots to red, because it's the same color as the coins and can get a little confusing if u are about to collect points or get shot.

Who did the music?

I like the sporadically sprinkled "konk" synth bass notes on raised scale-degree 6. That, and the sparsely-spaced synth chords that aren't hard-sync'd to the straight-ahead dance beat. (As a friend of mine would put it, you successfully avoided relegating those chords to "barline jail" :)

And the "shields down" sound effect is cute!

off to a good start! it's a little slow - difficulty should ramp up more quickly, and player powerups should keep pace, imo. I was so excited to get my first upgrade... only for it to just be the same default gun, with a stronger shot every once in a while. Then I was excited for the next... but all it did was something to my shield, that I didn't have time to examine while playing - and then the third was just... better slow mo?

I just kept expecting things to sort of blossom, get multi shots in different directions, homing shots, lasers, area damage weapons, focus / delay shot weapons.

and then I get to the first boss, and it just... spits bullets in random directions, faster and faster. No patterns or waves, and just a real linear unexciting difficulty increase, until eventually I get hit twice in a row and lose. :(

The hitbox / bullet thing doesn't feel great either - modern shooters have really gotten me used to the idea that your hitbox is mostly just your cockpit, so you can real carefully edge your way between bullets if you have good reflexes and gauged it right - and part of that system is making it real clear where the bullets are, which this design... doesn't.

The bullets blend too easily into the background, and are way way way too similar to the coins. I'm glad the coins autocollect, because if they didn't, it would basically be a nightmare of constantly trying to figure out if you were being baited into 'collecting' a bullet instead of a coin.

what you've got here is really promising, but also needs a lot more work - I'd love to see you put the work in!

This is gorgeous. Love it.

A problem I regularly have with my for-fun games is that I can’t find assets for them. Most assets on free/cheap asset sites are for isometric 2D pixel art games.

I need sprites for raycast games! I would pay someone $20 to give me some quick, serviceable stuff but I imagine they would need much more for it to be worthwhile. I can’t justify more than that for throwaway personal projects.

I’m looking at AI art but it doesn’t quite get anything in the format I need.

I might just borrow the Chex Quest assets…

I love that the mouse control is so much like an Atari paddle controller that it even recreates the overshoot penalty at the edges of the screen which requires you to go back as far as you overshot to get off the edge. And my mouse isn't very ergonomic so I even got the classic Atari paddle wrist pain experience! Cool concept.

Great game, controls felt tight and difficult was well balanced. My one complaint is the stages are way too long, it feels like a slog until you get to a boss

I made the mistake of opening this on my phone. It is technically playable in that tapping the screen causes the sprite to fire and teleport around the screen. It is not feasibly playable this way, though, because movement range seems limited to the bottom half of the left third of the screen only. Still enjoyed the music & graphics, though!

That is very cool - like your work. How do you restart the game - i had to use the back button after i died

As a child of the 80s, I love everything about this!

I also appreciate the fact it runs smoother than most modern SPAs.

Good game. I wonder why they didn't use spritesheets? Each frame of the animated effects seems to be a separate PNG image.

Fun. Right-mouse on Mac is nearly impossible, though.

Maybe alternate vertical-scrolling with side-scrolling, like Salamander did.

Nice. I do think portrait would be better for a vertical shooter.

Lovely!

I feel like dancing while playing this.

Cool! It’s really fun