Original Post
Hi everyone, newbie here. Personally I'm a huge fan of bullet hell shooters, and one day I thought of the concept of creating a kind of netplay version of this type game, and I was wondering if I could get some feedback. Currently, I only have a general idea of where this will be headed, since I want to know whether I should move on to more detailed planning. For those who don't know what bullet hell shooters are, here are some great YouTube videos from a series called Touhou (my favorite of all the bullet hells). Touhou 10 - Mountain of Faith [Extra]
Touhou 8 - Imperishable Night [Stage 6b Lunatic]
Touhou 10 - Mountain of Faith [Stage 4 Lunatic]
Essentially, a million bullets fly onscreen and you have to dodge them all. Simple. _________________________________ Alright, so here's the plan. You can play as a single person or two people co-op on a single computer. Since this is netplay that means you can technically play 2 vs. 2. There are two sets of controls: Pilot and Engineer. (If you're playing as one person you'll use both, otherwise each person will be assigned a role.) The pilot is the set of controls that tell the main character on the screen where to move. The control include directional keys, shot button, focus button, and I'm still thinking about whether or not to include another special button (which I can explain later). The engineer has a set of directional keys as well, a select button, and a back button. On the main screen, there will be two character sprites or whatever you would call them. You would control the one facing upward (the opponent's view is flipped, so he's also playing the one facing upward, or downward from your point of view). Enemies will fly onscreen and shooting one down will cause it to drop a chip. If you collect the chip, then you can use the engineer controls to select it and put it into the program window. You can combine several chips to create an intricate program that will send a barrage of bullets onscreen when executed. Both opponents will have to dodge the pattern, but there will probably be a slight advantage to the player who executed the program in most cases. Process repeats until all the player's lives are drained. (Each player's shots do not damage the other player. That would be too easy.) Now the essence of the game obviously lies within the chips. Enemies will be of random ranking, each with a different color. Higher ranking enemies will appear less often, have higher hit points, and move faster. However, they will drop stronger chips. (I am still trying to figure out if there is some way to make it harder to use stronger chips, such as a cost for each chip of some sort. Otherwise, some patterns may become much too powerful.) Depending on the type of chip, such as pattern, movement, accessory, linking, special, they will be placed in the different categories, making them easier to sort. When they are selected a menu will appear with several options, including throw away, place in program, etc. The engineer can also move to the program window if necessary in order to tweak the program, such as removing a chip or reordering them. Executing the program puts the pattern on the screen. Now you may be asking what the chips are like. Like I've said before, there are different types. Pattern will just create a very defined pattern, such as a curve, line, or shape that the bullets will form. It will probably also include the type of bullet (what size and shape the bullet is). Movement chips will tell the program how to move the bullets, such as random direction, straight down, lock-on on the player, etc. Accessory chips will give the bullets special properties, such as flipping the direction of the entire pattern, putting acceleration into the movement, changing the movement or pattern, or having the bullets split up into more bullets. Linking chips are going to be like operators (I think that's the right analogy). With linking chips you can stack more than one bullet pattern or create more subgroupings within a program, or apply other logic related features to the programs. The point of the linking chips is supposed to be an advanced feature that will really create allow the player to create some fun, intricate, beautiful and difficult patterns. Finally, special chips are a feature I have yet to decide whether to include, and these apply directly to the player, such as temporary invincibility, the ability to shoot bullets, slowdown, smaller hitbox, or an extra life. As I mentioned above, the player could have a special button to execute the special chip when he or she feels like it, or that could be the engineer's job, to time the chips. So that's the basic idea of the game. I can totally imagine it and it would seem like the kind of multiplayer game people can play over and over again, with significant learning curves and levels of difficulty, so the fun keeps going but competition will be always be incredibly fierce. Not to mention it's possible to just keep adding different kinds of chips into the game, making the possibilities endless. Let me know what you guys think. I think this could be a game with a TON of potential. P.S. It's too late for me to learn programming. I'll never have the time to train myself to get up to the ability I need to be in order to execute many of my ideas. Is there some place (or is this the place) where I can ask for volunteer programmers/any other people and form a team or something like that?