MsK

60FPS patch released! I added achievements too! GL & HF

cc @B238ben @TheGameTutor @cdriper @Corbs @60frames-please @ramu-chan

After months of hard work, I finally finished the Switch 60 FPS patch. This was not an easy task. It is currently being tested by Nintendo and should be available in the coming weeks

@EmirParkreiner 🤫

@bluesdance Actually, we worked a lot for the game to be color blind friendly. It's a quarter of the population after all! (at varying degrees)

So that's one of the reasons, in the game, it's not written red green and blue but "red jaguar", "green serpent", "blue condor". We tied the colors to divinities. All the patterns and models associated to each divinity/color have thus distinct patterns and shapes. This was a very hard job to do right and with a team 3, a some point, we dropped the idea.

But as it turns out, I've seen a lot of color blind gamers play the game and our worked paid off! I didn't talk to any color blind gamer so far that had an issue distinguishing the enemies!

Of course, it's a little harder for them, but they play really fine. The only two problems I got so far: one once said "yeah, I have no problem distinguishing the enemies but the pink bullets on the pink snow in the first level, that was rough" I didn't see that one coming... Since then we raised the contrast of the bullets. I didn't get any comment of the sort since the tweak

The other minor problem is that we flash the enemies in white, yellow or red when you hit them, depending if you crush, drain or boost upon impact. We had completely forgotten that red on boost was a pretty close red to the red/orange we use for jaguar enemies. So, on one boss, one player was hesitating if the boss was blue or red. He actually got it right! So that's why I started working on patterns for the impacts, so that it's not one big red flash but rather a stripy one. I didn't have time to put in time for the release though. But I hope to have it in the 60Hz patch!

@Insect_Prince We are indeed working on a PS4 version. No date for this one yet.
As for the switch physical release, we would like to have the 60FPS patch sorted out first, as you can probably understand

@ramu-chan @Judgedean if you know of someone that got the game, ask to play and don't get hang up on the fact that you know the game is running at 30. There's a simple reason the review doesn't mention the game not running at 60, it's not written the screen, the visuals are smooth and the pace of the game while frenetic, still totally playable due to the way we designed the weapons and the whole game really. This is not a fighting game or FPS where you have to react to unpredictable stuff. This is a shoot'em up where everything is predictable and all you have to do is focus and pay attention to the details to get through smoothly

@commentlife You totally got why I locked at 30FPS instead of freeing the 60FPS. While most of the first level ran fine at 60FPS and a great deal of the rest of the game, the drops to 30FPS where just awful and completely random. It feels the impression that the game would accelerate and slowdown back and forth, kind of like some weird motion sickness. Stable 30 is infinitely superior to any unstable 60. That is to say, I really want Pawarumi at 60 on the Switch <3

@BulkSlash Haha, with both games in easy mode, Ikaruga is definitely WAY harder than Pawarumi! Great game and I still appreciate the effort though!

@60frames-please It runs at 30fps, for the moment! I worked very hard to get to 60FPS and I was really not that far. But I hit a wall at some point I could not overcome in Unity. I'm working with Unity to take down that wall and, hopefully, a nice 60FPS patch will show up

@commentlife That's a true nintendo fan avatar you got there. And thank you for the lovely comment

YYEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! Thank you Nintendo Life! Thank you PJ O'Reilly! <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3

Oh, I thought it was a new one

@EmirParkreiner There's also Psyvariar Delta that recently got released on Switch.

@GFoyle You're absolutely right! But what I'm trying to say is that vertical gameplay with 4/3 horizontal screen or 16/9 yields more or less the same problems and the same advantages

Before 16/9 screens were a thing, there were already many games with an horizontal view and a vertical scrolling: Radiant Silvergun, Raycrysis, Super Aleste, etc. This was just a natural evolution of that kind of game.
We chose it because it worked well with the "epic staging" we wanted. And also because we knew most people wouldn't rotate their screens, and it would be too bad to admire the art of our game through a tiny window in the middle of the screen

@Antraxx777 Three buttons to fire the 3 weapons/colors so that it's really easy and fast to switch! There is no power-up at all in the game. We give you everything right from the start and it's up to you to master the tools

The game is fully designed to be played on a 16/9 horizontal screen. The level design fully takes advantage of the horizontal aspect of the screen with the vertical controls. Tate mode would be a whole new game ^^

There's no multiplayer because we didn't want to splat a second ship on the screen and call it a day. We had crazy ideas for a multiplayer mode and planned to add for free it if the game did good enough. This is unfortunately not an option anymore, but I have a cool idea, simpler, for a multiplayer and truly coop mode that could make it someday... We'll see!

@NinChocolate In terms of the number of bullets on screen? Gradius.

@Terrible_Majesty It's much more, hummm, let's say tactical / strategic, and less combo / puzzle than Ikaruga. But yeah, I understand why you'd think it's similar

@GFoyle
That's something we noticed a lot while showcasing at various events: a lot of people would stop and dare at our game, just because they were attracted by all the shiny explosions, I guess. So while we started out making a shmup for shmup fans, we quickly understood this was too bad of an opportunity at bringing more people to the genre. I tried for a long time to keep the arcade vibe with only one difficulty level, but with 5 levels overall, that was just too steep.

So we ended up with three different difficulty levels that I would describe like this:

• easy is beatable by anyone with basic reflexes with a gamepad and a few hours to spare
• normal is beatable by any action game enthusiast with a few more hours to finally "beat" the boss
• hard is the classic arcade-like experience. It's still not a bullet hell, well, except maybe for the final fight ahah, but it's challenging alright

To spice things up a little, we changed the order of the levels and slightly twisted the story with every difficulty setting. The game encourages you to play normal mode after you finished easy mode to push the story further and to play hard mode after that to get the "best" ending!

About my favorite shmups, if I had to keep only three, these would be the original gradius, dodonpachi and ikaruga. Dodonpachi bringed me to the genre and I still can't one credit it ahah, but it's just because I don't play enough. I loose all my skills between the weeks I don't play. The original gradius because it astounded me by how strategic it is and how advanced the power up system was at the time, while being the first power up system! And ikaruga, because as insanely hard as it is, it's a masterpiece

Yes, I can beat Pawarumi in hard mode After quite a few tries, I must admit! It's much harder to heal in hard mode since the bullets get much faster.

And... thanks for the support! <3

It's in the works, that's all I can say

@GFoyle I'd be happy to answer any questions you might have

It's kind of what they do with amiibos! But yeah, it's not the same than putting games together.

It's fun to read "too many shmups" alongside "not enough shmups"