Risk, Reward, and the Plasma Auger

Offering gamers a choice between less risk but lower rewards and higher risk but higher rewards is what offers the fundamental addictive and exciting element in many games.

In Shoot 1UP, as you maneuver your ever-growing phalanx of ships you have some options controlling them. You can draw them together to be as small as a single ship, lowering the likely-hood that you'll get hit, or you can expand your fighters, increasing the possibility of one them being destroyed.


Collapsing your ships is easy with the left shoulder or trigger. But you have even more control in the form of the X button which puts on the ships' air brakes, causing you to move a third of your normal speed and granting you finer movements to dodge incoming bullet swarms and enemies.

If you do choose to expand your ships, which is easily performed on the fly via the left shoulder or trigger, you are rewarded in several ways.

First, shown on the HUD via a row of icons is the "spread gauge" which directly reflects your "spread multiplier". Each enemy you kill grants you a given amount of points. But if you kill an enemy with your spread multiplier active (showing at least one pip), you now cause them to drop a "points medal" which you can catch for higher scores.
The bigger your spread, the higher the multiplier can get--all the way up to x30.

As your ships spread out more, it makes it easier to catch the point medals, but again scarier because you're more likely to crash.

The most exhilarating reason to expand your ships is to activate the Plasma Auger. Once you've gained at least two ships, you can now fire the Plasma Auger by holding down the fire button though it takes a moment to warm up. You must have your spread multiplier (and your ships) expanded to the fourth pip, signified by being brighter and whiter.


This giant stream of destruction can go from very small to very wide, and increase in damage all based on how you use it.

For the more skilled player, the Plasma Auger doesn't require more ships to increase in size and damage--it only needs a bigger spread multiplier. The best way to get that is to keep your ships circular (or simply diagonal) and watch your hud for feedback.

The Plasma Auger is available in 2 player as well, and even possible with the Ghost powerup. Grab a buddy and start playing for a total of 3 enormous pillars of alien-rending energy!
We avoided launching the game this week (Jan 25th) so as not to be devoured by ME2. With that in mind, Shoot 1UP should be firing it's way your Xbox 360 by early February (possibly within a week)!

Feedback Incorporated

Shoot 1UP's playtesting sessions have been going really well and already yielded some nice changes. Thanks for testing everyone! It's been great trying to fold various suggestions into my overall design of the game in order to create an even stronger version.

Here's some new features that weren't initially in the game but were influenced through the recent playtests.

• Awards system: Originally I hadn't planned for it, but it is great fun to have little extra challenges for which to strive in addition to "just beating the game" or a high score.
• Story paintings: I had a story in mind as I was creating the game initially but wasn't sure if it was going to fit the final game. Dean Dodrill suggested I add some story element to make the game feel "complete".
• 1UP super-bombs: Initially if you hit the 30 ship single-player max, the 1UPs just added to your score. Players wanted something more, so I decided the extra 1UPs could be triggered to act as super-bombs instead!
• More Bosses and monsters: I love making monsters. That shouldn't be a surprise after Weapon of Choice. But initially Shoot 1UP was going to be pretty small. It's not a giant game now, but it's definitely filled out, and so far everyone's really loving all the new bosses!

The game is getting close to finish and I'm sending out preview copies to the press. It's wrapping up really nice and should be in your hands within the month!

Shoot 1UP 7-Day Work Diary

I had never created a game for Experimental Gameplay yet, but October 09's Numbers theme really inspired me. Growing up loving shoot 'em ups of all kinds, I imagined a vert scroller in which powerups poured forth from enemies, but the player gained playable ships instead of just switching weapons or getting super bombs. Thus Shoot 1UP was born. It's since grown in size, aged a little, and lost its baby teeth in favor of a mouthful of real chompers.

As I explained to 2BeeGames developers, I keep careful notes on my games during production. Mainly to keep myself on track for the tight seven day schedule, but also in case anything went wrong, or if any particular discovery could be useful in future work.

What follows is a unedited log of the development during those first (non-consecutive) seven days of Shoot 1UP's development (including embarrassing though humorous self-congratulations). Notice, the 'big things; take longer up front, and more little details begin to fill the list as the polish goes in (what little there was at the time).

DAY 1

October 21, 2009
Got the TiledSprites sample working and running as Shoot1UP.
Experimenting with the cloud layer.
The parallax is broken in the sample. I’m trying to improve it.
Worked on some graphics this morning to try out a new art style.

DAY 2

October 22, 2009
Got the tiled sprites to scroll properly and repeat forever.
Abstracted classes out into game objects, and made an animation class for sprites.
Got the ship back in, properly, with no animation.
More ship sketches.

DAY 3

October 23, 2009
Ship flying around! But not super well animated.
Played with distortion/pixel effects as well.
New animations for ship are working.
Drew some more, revised ship.
Animations work pretty well but code needs more work.

DAY 4

October 24, 2009
Animation functions (AnimDone, etc).
Ship rolls left and right correctly.
Shots drawn. Shots playing. Shots able to recycle.
Refactored anim code to reuse static data better.
Added in shadows for objects.
Level scrolls automatically now.
Drew temp enemy. Temp enemies spawning via level controller. Recycling in pool.
Level controller knows all player shots and enemies.
Enemies and player shots can collide.
DamageInfo class in place, and used.
Shots disappear, ships die after health gone

DAY 5

October 26, 2009 (Skipped Saturday and Sunday)
Ship locked to screen. Widened screen. Scaled down shadows
Fixed bounding box collision determination (was only using circle test)
Moved all objects to level controller from main game file.
Update lists find max current objects dynamically now.
Player ship can die on enemy ships and enemy bullets. Level can reset (kinda crappy).
Powerups for new ships. New ships from powerups (up to 30) Increased player bullet count.
Offset all ships based on count (ship trail/ship worm looks awesome!)
Early hud, points, ship count.
Added push-pull mechanics/controls for player ships

DAY 6

October 28, 2009 (Skipped Tuesday)
Temp explosions drawn.
Fixed anim bug with not storing time per frames.
Refactored all objects to use “delete” bool instead of just state checks.
Added explosions to list.
Small enemies make explosions on death.
Big player explosion temp art. Big explosion in new list, to collide with enemy shots.
More awesome refactoring. I wasn’t resetting health in some objects on recycling, so things couldn’t die since they already thought they were dead!
Fixed multiple-updates per same explosion bug (took a while)
Uggh, lots more nasty update bugs fixed. Not carefully keeping track of things dying.
New art pass on bullets for player/enemies Enemies now grant you new player ship powerups based on numbering system I added in three streams of enemies—pretty fun now! And really challenging (not surprising). Polished the pop animations for enemy bullets and the player shot muzzle flash animation.

DAY 7

October 29, 2009
Keyboard controls working alongside pad controls
Refactoring game/levelcontroller to use menu system to exit game.
Menu waits to start game.
Early Pause menu works.
High score board works now.
Nice’d up the main menu and score board.
Randomly rotating most explosions now.
New explosions, new ship arts.
Tweaked difficulty to change as you play.
Fixed pause bug (can spawn bullets when paused).
Done!
Sigh, didn’t get to sound.

You can play the 7-day version of Shoot 1UP, linked in this previous post. But it's really small and simple, basically only a prototype. With luck the complete Shoot 1UP will be out on the Xbox 360 next month Feb. 2010!

Shoot 1UP is out NOW!

Shoot 1UP

UPDATE: Shoot 1UP is out now for only 80 MS Points! Check it out here!


Why play shoot'em ups one ship at a time? Launch them all at once!
Unleash an entire armada of ships in Shoot 1UP!


Instead of stowing each 1UP you collect, each new ship becomes playable immediately, resulting in an ever-growing armada of destruction!

With your home world ruined, lead your detached battalion's charge by destroying the mechanical-tentacle hybrid forces responsible for your pain.

• 1UPs INSTANTLY enter the ACTION!
• Command over 30 ships at the SAME TIME!
• 2 Player coop for over 60 SIMULTANEOUS player ship INSANITY!
• WEAPONS UPGRADE as you collect more ships (And downgrade when you lose them so stay sharp!)
• Sacrifice ships for a BULLET-VAPORIZING BOMB which increases in power the more ships you've collected!
• Manic Shooting without all the wailing and gnashing of teeth--NORMAL GAMERS can actually enjoy this!
• Hardcore? Jump into the action several waves in for THUMB-TWISTING difficulty!
  

See Shoot 1UP in action! Play it in JANUARY FEBRUARY 2010 NOW on Xbox 360 Indie Games!




Here's the press kit with screenshots, title, and trailer.
Check out this free, super-duper early version of Shoot 1UP to whet your whistle!

And what's UP with Grapple Buggy? Short answer: it's coming along fine. Long answer: read this!

November 09 and Year One Numbers

Weapon of Choice data for November 2009:

Trial downloads: 7,145
Sales (240 MS Points): 563

Which puts the conversion rate at about 7.9%

(Click for the big picture.)

As you can see from the graph, Thanksgiving day/weekend was nicely higher than a normal week. And weekends in general were higher, but Mondays were lower, at least for trial downloads.

Also this post I wanted to share the first year data from November 19th 2008 to 2009 since Weapon of Choice just celebrated its first birthday.

Trial downloads: 182,055
Sales: 11,293
(400 MS Points: 10,250, 240 MS Points: 1043)

Conversion rate's about 6.2% for that period, including both prices.

Make sure to click the sales label below for past month data!