Bullet hell / Shooter: Possible?

Hi,

I was wondering how many of these are "impossible" to do, how many would require way too much time for one person only, and which ones are very easy to implement.

My plan is to slowly build my way up and I think Construct 2 is the best way to do that. I'll start simple, but eventually I'd want to make a shoot'em up game with a lot of custom patterns for bullets and such things.

Now, I know that there's virtually "no code" in Construct so I was wondering how would I go about making custom patterns for the bullets.

I figured out easily how to make some basic stuff. Adding a "sine" behavior to a bullet helps a lot, you can even modify the wave shape (triangle, sawtooth, etc). The problem is things start to add up and it's hard to keep track of stuff without code. Let's say I have this custom bullet that uses a sine wave to modify it's angle so instead of a straight line it goes a bit round but still towards the same spot. The next points are my first doubts while trying the software.

How do I go about adding a way for the bullets to track the player and *slowly* move towards him without removing the custom movement I made?

How can I make explosions with custom shape? I know the answer is "math", and I know some basics, but still how am I going to add something like a smiley face of bullets when an enemy dies?

Same question as the above ones: how about a spiral? Is that even possible?

Is there any actual limitation for this type of games in Construct 2?

Thanks,

Custom explosions are easy, just have animations of fireballs, smiley faces you mention, and whatever else you need. Then add some particles in Construct and use a combination of those.

Tracking the player is easy, never tried that with custom movements you describe, but I think it's all doable within reason.

The limitations you may have to worry about will be in the area of "exactly how many of these can I have on screen at the same time"

Backtired

Im making a (non bullet-hell) shmup myself but havent got to the bullets yet.

However I've experimented enough to know that construct makes it about as easy as can be without doing it for you and that the possibilities are only limited by the time and effort you can afford to put in (as well as the performance of your target platform.)

Just FYI most of the pro bullet hell shmups use a bullet scripting language called BulletML. (a BulletML plug in is available in the store). But you can probably do most, if not all, the same stuff with built in behaviors (and a bit of ingenuity). The really fancy native shmup engines draw the bullets off screen in a separate process and paste them all back as one single overlaying sprite for extreme performance. (However I have a suspision that the html canvas object kinda works like this also)

There are definitely a few tutorials on you-tube showing you how to make bullet flowers in construct, once you understand that there should be no stopping you.

also

Ive listed a few Construct 2/3 shmups here (I must update this list)

but you can see the possibilities.

https://www.scirra.com/forum/pro-shmups-made-with-constsruct-2-3_t187657?&hilit=pro+shmup

Don'Yoku (on the list above) would be like something you are going for.

although that is a proper pro endeavor probably not the best Idea to go straight for something like that if it is your first time. But hey, no-one is going to stop you!

Good luck with your project it would be great to see some more shmuppage on here.

Very interesting list, thanks

My main concern is... I can't basically create a class in Construct 2. How am I going to manage everything? I know I can make "families" which are a very simplified version of classes, but I need to have a system of my own and come up with something. I'm afraid there's no way to do this (that is, create a system to ease some functions, instead of writing everything ten times or doing tedious stuff) unless I program in JavaScript a plugin, right?

I mean I looked at some of those games and I have a hard time believing some of these were made without some kind of OOP approach

EDIT: I don't even think you can make functions/methods ?

Rest assured you can do it with just events and no custom plugins or JavaScript would be needed. There is a function object you need to add to your project in the same list as sprites and stuff.

How hard can it be? There is nothing that construct lacks that makes it impossible.

EDIT:

Here's an example made in a couple hours to give you ideas:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/jbykgixjixvx8 ... .capx?dl=1

Backtired

sadly Im at work so I cant see R0J0hound example but Im sure its gonna be cool!

but for sure there are functions (chunks of code that can be called from wherever),

which I assume are similar to classes.

my whole game is a ton of functions that call each other

events/code can call functions

functions can call functions,

you can have iterative functions inside functions,

you can have functions within the expressions of other functions

and functions can pass and return values to each other and/or back to where they were called

https://www.scirra.com/manual/149/function

no excuses, get on with it......

Rest assured you can do it with just events and no custom plugins or JavaScript would be needed. There is a function object you need to add to your project in the same list as sprites and stuff.

How hard can it be? There is nothing that construct lacks that makes it impossible.

EDIT:

Here's an example made in a couple hours to give you ideas:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/jbykgixjixvx8 ... .capx?dl=1

Wow, so sweet man, always so enlightening to see the way you do things ..... that animated dude tho....... <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_e_biggrin.gif" alt=":D" title="Very Happy"> .....

Thanks. I was pretty pleased how that guy came out.

That is super neat!!

Thanks a lot for sharing the project. I'll try to find the right workflow with this events/actions thing

Much appreciate the effort

amazing. This gives me some ideas.

R0J0,

Here is my recent BulletML style attempt. The main difference is it gives you a circle perimeter around an object to bloom from. Hope you like it :) This would be cool with your dual 4x pop

Sharing if anyone else needs this. Thanks for getting me on the right path R0J0

dropbox.com/s/u8qk14qaesqpcwi/bulletcircleidea.capx