Bullet Hell Bullet patterns

Hi everyone!

I'm new to the Construct 2 and as my first dabble I've decided to make a danmaku (or Bullet Hell) shooter.

While development is going well, I have hit a problem, as other than the sine wave behaviour being used to create a simple swaying bullet formation, I am at a loss as to how to make the bullet patterns, (such as the grids, circles, swirls and such). Can anybody give me any advice, or point in any directions?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance (and Merry Christmas!)

Regards,

Pandemonium

I had to use google to find out what you mean, for I had no idea.

It seems like the bullets are spawned in mathemetical ways. So you'd first have to know the formulas you'd want to use.

creating a swirl would be done by creating bullets at around the player flying outwards at certain intervals and changing the angles.

Example:

This

is done by these events:

<img src="https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/48563442/bulletshapes.jpg" border="0">

Ah! Thank you so much for that LittleStain! I now have a functioning spiral fire pattern!

Now I need to know if anyone out there has any idea of how to code the likes of circles, grids and lines of bullets.

Again, thanks so much LittleStain, that was exceptionally helpful! :D

Maths.

Bahahahaha, yeah, I figured that minffaQ. Any idea of the required formula for circles?

create all the bullets in one event and sent them of flying in all the angles you want..

Sorry for the little hijacking...

Pandemonium or LittleStain - noob question here... I'm doing a shooter. I've setup an event to shoot randomly every 2-3 seconds, but ALL the enemies shoot at the same time.

How can I make this so the enemies shoot at different intervals?

Build a shoot them up from scratch

Pandemonium, actually MindfaQ is quite right.

To make a game like this you should:

• Learn the math behind the different bulletsprays.

Or..

• Learn to fake the math behind it.

One quick google search turned up This

Thanks for everyone's help here guys.

notnsane, add a secondary condition that is called 'pick random instance', as everytime the game cues the enemy to 'shoot' it will pick one random instance of that enemy on screen and make it be the one to fire, so the player is not assaulted by a barrage of bullets. Hope that was remotely helpful. :)

Yeah, I'm trying to figure out the maths now, and I did have a go at creating the circle, but the problem was that once created, if I tried to alter the bullets trajectory, it altered EVERY instance of that object, which didn't work, because the circle (by default) resulted in negating all movement, as for every trajectory, there was an equal one acting in the opposite direction. -_-

Pandemonium:

learn how picking works if you only want some of your objects to be affected

Sorry for the little hijacking...

Pandemonium or LittleStain - noob question here... I'm doing a shooter. I've setup an event to shoot randomly every 2-3 seconds, but ALL the enemies shoot at the same time.

How can I make this so the enemies shoot at different intervals?

you can use timers for this or 2 instance variables on every shooting enemy (one containing the time when it last shot and the other the shooting delay) and each frame check for each enemy if lastshottime+shootingdelay less or equal time. If yes, set lastshottime to lastshottime+shootingdelay and run the function that creates the fitting shoots for your enemy. If you expect more than one firing to occur per frame for one enemy (maybe because of high firing rate and slow fps), you could check for the condition a second and third time in subevents.

Instead of going into very deep maths, you could try to use tricks. Invisible sprites patrolling between two other invisible sprites that spawn bullets every.x secons can be used to create a grid of bullets, if placed correctly. Combined with sine behaviour and maybe even car behaviour you can do some interesting patterns.

So basically: Some number of invisible sprites spawning bullets and moving and/or rotating around should do the trick I guess...

Ahh, I'll habe to look into picking then, mindfaQ, I hadn't considered that. And Windwalker, I hadn't considered that at all, but it is definitely something I will test out, because I can actually manage that :D

Thanks for your help guys!