Can I get some critiques on my greenlight trailer/pitch?

News & General Discussion
1

Hello, devs. I’m getting ready to put my game on Steam Greenlight soon, but I first wanted to see if anyone would be kind enough to give me some critique on the icon, trailer, and description. Without further ado…

Icon: Imgur: The magic of the Internet

Trailer:

Description:
"
Starkonn is a fast paced arcade style shoot-em-up resembling the classic bullet hell shmups of the past.

Battle through 50 levels with 10 unique bosses and over 20 unique enemy types.
Test your skill with multiple game types and various challenge modes.
Customize your playstyle with various unlockable ship types and companion satellites.
Prove your dominance with global leaderboards for every game mode.
"

Any helpful advice or constructive criticism would be greatly appreciated, thanks!

2

Whats interesting or special about your game? Graphically it looks mediocre; I don’t see any interesting weapons or bosses… whats the pitch? You don’t give any explanation as to why someone would want to play it. You should!

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3

Looks pretty good. How are you controlling the aim and movement of the ship there? That seems very unique for this type of game. Maybe highlight the control scheme in your description because that should be a selling point, I think.

As for your icon, I think the wings need some small details like aileron lines, fuel hatches or something. Maybe they should taper more towards the edges to look more aerodynamic, but overall it looks fine.

I’m also in the greenlight trailer/pitch phase of my game. I’m using OBS to capture footage. What did you use for yours? Did you use any specific settings? I’m not sure if I should change the fps setting and whatnot.

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Thats the kind of thing I’m talking about (sorry if my initial post was too harsh).

It very well may be that your selling point is as simple as “you want a new bullet hell, well this one is as good as all the old ones you love”.

5

It looks…OK?

I mean, it doesn’t look bad in any sense…but I’m not super impressed by it…

Are the sprites and art all yours? They’re pretty good I guess. I like your icon too, very old fashioned.

I just know I’ve seen shmups from the Sega Saturn era that looked much more visually impressive…and they had to develop on Sega Saturn!

The backgrounds feel kinda…empty and 2 dimensional. Theres nothing for scale to create a sense of paralax. Most of the time it looks like you’re just sitting still and the ships are just coming to you, it doesn’t feel like you are flying towards the ships or fighting in air/space. You have a million ships shooting a million bullets each, and it still feels visually boring somehow.

The fact that the player ship is also super small on screen doesn’t allow you to really see detail on it’s design, In a way, I feel like it could be easy to lose track of the ship in all the chaos. It should be shiny and bright and easy to distinguish from the background and the enemy ships.

Also…maybe you didn’t show it off in the trailer, but I feel like it’s a little bland in terms of mechanics, I see no crazy missles or super lasers or bombs or addtional types of powerups besides just the regular blaster. If they were shown, I didn’t really notice them. Shmups have been around for a long time, so the mechanics have had a while to evolve. In general thats the reason there aren’t a lot of shmups these days, because in the mid 90s, EVERYONE was making them, like, think FPS games about 6 years ago, times 10. I think pretty much every gimmick you can think of for a shmup has already been done. Even flying penguins fighting giant pandas doing ballet. Look up Parodius. It’s real.

Look at the game Rayforce (also known as Gunlock or Layer Section depending on your region), it was possibly one of the best looking 2D shmups in existance, I think it still even holds up by today’s standards. It has less ships on the screen, but the screen is way more visually interesting because these guys killed it on the paralax effects and made it look amazing. The effects they use like having massive objects like giant asteroids and massive warships in the background give you a sense of scale, and the stuff below you like the little landers on the space rocks and turrets on the big ships shooting up and you and you shooting down at them give you an illusion of 3 dimensional space. And the secondary locking laser weapon looks super cool and gives you more options.

But there are a lot of others you should probably research too, a lot of ideas have been done that you just seem to not be using. Right now your game is just sideways moving Galaga with a grittier aesthetic. Give it something to make it feel unique. And make it more visually exciting.

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6

Good points. The movement is keyboard controlled (wasd) and the aim/shots are mouse controlled.

I just used Geforce Shadowplay with desktop capture enabled, it records high quality and high frames per second.

Good point, I’ll try to think of how to better articulate the features that make the game unique.

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The solid color orbs look out of place. When you got to the boss rather then showing 100% complete maybe replace it with a big boss up top (rather then the rinky-dinky healthbar on the boss).

8

the title on the blue background looks lame, looks like a crappy youtube video no one cares much about

Imgur: The magic of the Internet use that image instead … or one like it , it looks nice

maybe have like words pop out mid , or bottom mid screen , maybe with an explosion or something (if the effect / explosion doesnt look like crap) saying good features about the game…
maybe try to match it with the music, or video cuts

yeah those things lol:

do you have other screens, things to show in the game other than what is seen here?
like inventory loadout? or something like that? highscores? something?
if you do, add some of that too, just a little, to cut the monotony, and say like “customize your ships loadout with amazing assortment of items” … something like that, whatever makes sense.

maybe even show the most epic or like dramatic moment of a boss fight in slowmo or something like that, or zoomed in… just a different scene other than what i see here, if you can
or like when the player gets a power up show it in slowmo like you shoot one kind of gun, you get the powerup then you have some kind of quick motion of the camera, zooming in or something, and hes shooting the powerup gun, and the words come up “get awesome powerups” or whatever

some kind of action that varies it up

something like that lol

9

Well, as others have put it, the trailer to me just highlights kinda mediocre graphics… I actually do like the ships even though they somehow could use some spicing up, but whats with those green bars atop ships? Whats with those flat colored dots to collect? Whats with the numbers popping up which use the most plain and boring font ever?
If anything, those 3 aspects for me make the game look kinda unfinished. Yeah, its a greenlight trailer, so I get that the game MIGHT not be finished. But maybe invest some more time to spice up what players see in this trailer?

→ If the green bars above ships are needed, integrate them better. Dunno, make them not just a flat color. Either give them a shape if the should be objects IN the game world, or make them blend in better if its part of the UI.
→ maybe give the pick up objects small sprites, some graphics that make them look like more than just glowing flat colored balls.
→ If the numbers are not REALLY important, drop them. I find them cluttering the screen even more in a genre which often is often featuring already quite cluttered screens. If they are important, maybe get a more fiting font and again integrate the numbers better into what is going on on the screen.

Then the trailer does not really show me much to distinguish your shmup from other shmups. What is it your game does different or better than other games?
If it has something to do with the green bar above enemies, or the number popping up, maybe point out with text blurps what these features are and how they work.

The text blurp is okay, I guess. Not terribly exciting or anything, even for shmup fans. I mean you are basically describing a textbook shmup right there.
How is your game standing out? It’s good you are reassuring me that your game delivers what I kind of expect of a shmup, but maybe give me something I really only can get from your game. Something that excites me.

I am sure your game has those features, maybe put those into the limelight.

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10

As a retro shmup player here are the things that stand out to me…

  • Gameplay “feels” slow and laborious. It might not be but that is how it appears in the video.
  • Enemies all move incredibly slowly. Some seem to not even be moving at all.
  • Enemies all “feel” the same. I see no real distinction. Just adding 4 to 5 more enemy movement patterns would make a huge difference. Particularly if combined with unique imagery for them. Simply recoloring would even be enough. Just something to differentiate them.
  • It looks like you are going for a kind of realistic scale and appearance on the bullets (and everything for that matter). And that makes them suck. The players projectiles “feel” insignificant. Lacking any force. And are nearly indistinguishable from the enemies. The enemy projectiles also “feel” insignificant.

Basically it doesn’t “feel” like any of the shmups I played in the past. It seems like you struggled between making a great shmup and trying to make things realistic in terms of scale and speed. Throw realism out the window. It has no place here.

EDIT: I should mention overall the graphics look good as far as quality is concerned. The music is good. The name is good.

I think it has potential but for the reasons listed above it feels like an early WIP. Don’t be afraid to go a little crazy. The crazy is what will make the game stand out.

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11

I noticed that you can change the direction you can shoot, does that mean you can move and shoot any direction you want?

I feel like if thats the case, you should take more advantage of that. Have waves that come from multiple directions, or maybe have some big slow ships that can only be hit in certain weak spots that require you to flank them. You could have some maps that fly right, but some maps where you are surrounded and you have to dogfight your way out. Or you could do like beat em ups like Streets of Rage where there are sections where you have to move, then sections where you have to stop and fight enemies from all directions

If you are aiming with the mouse, that would mean you could have standard shots on the left click, then have the right click be a secondary powerup weapon, like tracking missiles that follow your mouse cursor or EMP blasts that could stop ships from moving so you could out manuver them, or mines that you could drop for faster enemies to run into.

I think if you take advantage of your platform and make it play in a way that adapts the game to your control scheme rather than trying to adapt your platform to play like the millions of other generic shmups, perhaps thats what could make it stand out. You are making it play like an old shmup where the ship can only face one direction, when it’s obvious that you can do way more than that.

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