Archius v0.4 (Beta)

Hi there! I tried your game just now, I very much love these kinds of arcade-style bullet hell games.

Positives:

• Character designs, I like them on the sides of the screen that fill up that whitespace
• The bombs feel very satisfying to use, as someone who likes that risk-reward strategy.
• The power-ups and their effects very much remind me of games like Radirgy or Kauros, where their range and lock-on feel very stimulating to watch them hit the enemies.
• Good use of visual feedback (lights, flash effects, screenshake)

Things that could be improved on:

• Particularly the UI, I think the overhead HUD should be bigger/be more distinctive especially in a game like this where A LOT of stuff is happening
• Bullet projectiles from the player ship still have that bilinear filtering (you can see this when the game’s paused), which makes that pseudo-ish motion blur effect since they move really fast, but not the projectiles coming from the enemies, which makes the gameplay a bit disorienting at first.
• There are some moments where the amount of bullets onscreen to dodge is absolutely insane (might be a skill issue on my end though since its been a while since I last played this type of game lol), so I think there should be some extended length of invincibility when respawning in.

All in all though, this demo is very much fun to play, and I had a fun time. I look forward to your future progress.

Hey RuV! Tried the game, love the visual style and sounds. Really feels like an arcade game.

Text during the boss fight is both too small and hard to read while dodging so many bullets.

In stage 2, the off-screen enemies keep shooting, but I don't think that's your fault. I brought it up to Suny in the discord. I notice it in my game now too.

But very promising work here! Keep it up!

I agree with Parent Tide comment, except for the bullets that works pretty well for me.

Did you try to scale the player down a bit to see how the gameplay feels?

Keep up the good work! :)

Good start, looks nice and fast.

I got consistently to the first boss without loosing life and consistently got wrecked by the second stage, I might be too slow to react.

Right now:

- Bullets animations make them a bit weird on the eye? (probably a bit too fast)

- There is no real incentive to leave the bottom of the screen as power up slowly descend.

- Wide shot feel way too strong as a result, Boss1 being large doesn't help either.

- Enemies not killed keep firing outside of the screen, again in favor of wide shot.

- Stage 2 bullets are way faster than the player speed, if you add the fact that the enemies fire outside the screen, it doesn't feel very good to play at the moment.

Keep it up!