On! The shooter where your gun is always on.
Final version was uploaded to the Java 4k site.
The graphics look very good. The momentum of the ship is too much. It’s hard to control.
I like the enemy bullets and explosion graphics. The curved purple beam looks very interesting. It does go extremely fast on this machine, so I have no real strategy. I know it’s an early version, so I’m being a bit unfair. Maybe limit the laser fire distance to half the screen and add mines that you must avoid hitting. Then forward and back movement would become important and there would be more strategy required for waves of mines, as you would have to navigate a maze of obstacles, as well as taking enemies out. If the mines went at different speeds, directions, that were fixed for each wave, there would be a learning element to each level. Maybe I’m thinking more galaxians-like. Slower movement would then work.
I like the overall feel of the graphics, nice pixely goodness 
And I think the game in general has a lot of potential (end of level bosses will be awesome).
My suggestions:
- Screen sliding - it seems to slide more when you hit the edge of the screen than when you move L/R within the screen. Feels like a bug.
- Gun “on” - Keep the gun on all the time, but add some delay until the top of the screen to make it harder to aim i.e. change it from a straight line to a chain of parts that gradually moves upwards from the player
- Explosions - Do you have space to add scaling/rotation/alpha? They seem too static at the moment.
Woo! Very addictive and plays very smoothly, when I try to move up, I seem to move up the screen extremely fast, and it’s a little hard to control when trying to get the power-ups, in saying that, i got a score of 3720 
All great comments. This is just what I was looking for.
I’ll work on the controls feel first. My original concept was to make them very dependable, but needing a few tricks to get it to move exactly to where you want quickly (it makes sideways motion more dangerous - you can slide into some bullets that are off screen). However, considering these comments and that, as a Java 4k game the average play time will be less than 5 minutes, I’ll make the controls easier.
The code even notes this as a bug - the “stickiness” of your ship on the side of the screen. Currently, the only way to see the motion is by noticing the background star field moving. I want to change this to show ship movement.
The gun action might need some tweaking, but I’m going to leave that for once I have some preliminary ideas down for enemy motion and bosses. The general concept is to make the player decide which weapon is better for a situation - the purple wavy beam which allows for maneuvering while still hitting the targets, but does less damage, or the direct ion gun blue straight beam which does lots of damage but puts you in more danger.
I currently don’t have the code in place for scaling the objects on a per-instance basis (it’s currently only in a per-template basis), but that should be easy to include, and will give some nice visual variations.
- They didn’t cover the right part of the map ? :
Wiping out huge swarms of small, fast and weak ennemies would be cool in a phase of your game.
For some time, I mistook your power-ups for wreckage to avoid at all cost.
I’ve reached my limit in file size for the large in-line static int[] version. While I’m taking the long road of (finally) migrating this to a String unpacked version, I’ve updated the game to include boss fights.
I’m thinking about changing the mechanics a bit - the lasso (purple beam) will heal you and maybe have a chance of destroying bullets, while only the blue laser hurts the enemies. Once I add in different bullet patterns, this may not be best, but I’m looking out for ways to make it different and interesting.
I’ve finished the conversion to string data.
Some gameplay changes I’ve added since the last updated version:
- no more lives. You’ve got one life, so handle it with care.
- the purple gun heals your ship, and doesn’t damage the enemies.
- bosses look better and have better shooting patterns.
I’ve just uploaded the pretty-final version, and will probably be uploaded to the 4k site in a few days.
It´s a really nice looking game! Two things that bother me though:
First of all I feel the ship is way to wide! In a shmup like this you´re usually supposed to be able to cruise through bullets and feel like a gaming genius. In this game you can´t really fly through a “bulletstorm”. You´ll have to wait it out and that, for me, kills some gameplay…
The other thing is what Best username already said: The momentum of the ship makes it to difficult to control, especially with the wide wings.
If those two things were to be fixed, I can actually see myself playing this alot.
Great job!
Thanks for the feedback. I’ve uploaded yet another version, this time with more unit variations and (hopefully) better controls. I had also felt the same thing about your ship’s size, so the ship is now slim enough to slip between the wide enemy’s bullets.
The final version is up and live on the Java 4k site.
Great game! The controls give it some “retro difficulty” that I like. Once I got the big gun it got a little easier. My current high score is 13780.
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bernie