what engine to make a bullet hell on?
Well actually as information technology turned out, quite possible, so let's take a deep dive into origins of such bizarre mashup!
Digital Soul Information RMN gamepage: https://rpgmaker.cyberspace/games/12002
The engine I am speaking about today is a little different than standard arsenal of RMN user, yet has a lot of common with RPG Makers – information technology's called OHRRPGCE which by the way stands for "Open Hamster Republic RPG Creation Engine".
*flashbacks to 5 years agone*
Well since the very first time I've seen Touhou series I cruel in love, honestly. Information technology was incredibly challenging yet so mesmerizing! Every bit many of us indie devs do, amongst the very first game concepts I was bearing in my mind as a beginner to game-making – was a Touhou fangame idea, the shooter which is not just stuffed with colorful projectiles of all shapes and colors only besides has some story with humane characters different from that of cliche shmup range – warships, infinite collisions and gruesome interstellar entities which won't bring a smile at thespian's confront as they casually contrivance waves and waves of spell cards and patterns infused with puns and lore.
courtesy of ZUN, from Touhou xi Chireiden ~ Subterranean Animism
Although for a complete novice similar me back so, with no gam mak skills whatsoever and no thought on how to outset the whole thing and make information technology real, the objective was clearly impossible to accomplish.
I began with looking into open up game engines like Construct and Unity, Godot wasn't even known as much every bit today. For a someone with pedagogy not even remotely related to math like me it could seem useless to always try, merely luckily enough I've stumbled upon 1 engine, which looked rather similar something from DOS era – black&white UI, monospace pixel font, keyboard-just controls(for the editor itself!) – OHRRPGCE.
engine UI
Non known to many, even upwards to this day, this tool appeared to be both opensource and "no programming noesis required"-type(or then I idea). Information technology has many limitations(many of which were successfully lifted by bizarrely devoted developers), long history of xx+ years with it's own rises and falls and overall by it'south capabilities relatively comparable to RPG Maker early installments such equally 2000 and 2003. With one groundbreaking feature – it allows users to write their own scripts using big syntax rendering most parts of engine accessible directly(unlike RPG Maker consequence organization which in my personal view is much less flexible and more inconvenient to edit) – it tin can be thought of equally Scarlet/js scripting support in newer RPG Makers.
And then the journeying began, I had envisioned a beautiful game about underwater palace waking upwardly from 5000-year slumber where main grapheme, the prince, had to escape his own prison he was sent to, before the whole affair collapses as an outcome of magic war… you become information technology. And how hard I failed!
Even with scripting and tutorials plant on the forums dedicated to OHRRPGCE I got apace bogged down in unsolvable bugs like bullets never disappearing from screen or non being able to motion parallax layer below character. It felt terrible and actually soul-burdensome then I had to essentially give upwardly and try something easier( spoiler: information technology wasn't a platformer as it's equally hard to make these in the engine aimed for creation of RPGs in style of Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest.)
Vikings of Midgard, one of nigh well-known and typical OHR games
Yet at present, v years later during occasional game jam the squad I was in agreed upon exploring such an ambitious idea – making a danmaku game with OHR, which meant a lot of default functionality had to be ignored and worked around with custom scripts.
But the most interesting part in my opinion is to explicate(briefly) some of the principles that are utilized to render a shooter game playable in RPG Maker-like engine.
Despite what I said in a higher place, *a lot* of default functionality was actually extended and built on, like the thespian grapheme is the default "actor" for hero slot 0 (from 4 in the party caterpillar) and NPC instances are used to create references for enemies and power-ups, converting their in-engine definitions to "slice" arrays(kinda like to Flash slice copse if anyone is familiar with these) – OOP physical instances which yield variables, foe stats in the engine are used to summate HP and firing rate, player lives and magnetic range for pulling power-ups are also referring to the hero stats, dialogue window lines are converted into the text to be shown with custom script enabling full bosom images and opacity modify for inactive speaker… east.g. it was beneficial due to:
a) non writing all these systems completely from scratch
b) allowing easily accessible and tweakable level design and stat essentials similar foe placement, phase length, ability-upward drop charge per unit, HP, damage, you lot proper name it – right in the engine.
Enemies are placed through the maps at the tile x y positions, and the map itself really doesn't move, but rather enemies are spawned in order they were laid out previously, with a 15-tick (250 ms) stride per row. In order to compress enemy placement at that place are fifty-fifty special "buffer" NPCs which hold time for fix amount for frames.
Phase map layout, y-marked tiles on the right are spawn positions for sides of screen
Speaking of which, the engine abides by old hardware issue – the game runs as fast equally it updates, due east.g. the speed of all events direct depends on framerate, resulting in 60FPS making everything incredibly fast or 18,two FPS humid it down to a choppy mess of filibuster. And for action genre such a shmup is you of class would want to have it going at maximal FPS possible.
To overcome this obstacle(preventing either bullets and enemies from moving at adequate speed or game from being a playable experience) programmers on our squad(I was responsible for graphics, sound and organisation) decided to implement workaround which early on second Mario games used, for instance, - a variable that represents units of i/256 of a pixel, that might be incremented by 64 every frame, making the object move one pixel per 4 frames. Though in our case it was 1/1000th of a pixel so movement appears to be actress-smoothen for an RPG engine physics, ahaha.
The game does not use salve states, but how does it think your scores? - you volition wonder. And there's an answer for that – OHRRPGCE is able to export global variables accessible across scripts into one of the save file slots instead of an bodily game relieve, and load them from information technology when the game is run other time – this mode it always preserves your loftier scores in the special ranked table, which by the way has an old-school ASCII color-cycling consequence for the 1st identify, which was added via commands similar to "Show Picture" in RPG Maker.
Snow Clash reference hither
Among many other things I allowed myself to steal some precious evolution time (we merely had slightly more than 2 weeks) and wrote a eastward s t h eastward t i c s "CRT"-effect, which is also easily replicable in RPG Maker in the way it was prepare up – use an paradigm covering the whole screen area, consisting of alternating black and transparent lines, display information technology at low opacity above everything on screen and motility it up and downwards by a pixel constantly.
One of easiest vfx always seen
So, persisting all imaginable difficulties and loopholes such a challenge may impose, I say aye, it is possible to make a fully functional bullet hell shooter game in something like RPG Maker( at that place must be similar attempts but personally I tin't point at annihilation precisely inheriting Touhou/Ikaruga mechanics due to my limited knowledge of RMN gamelist, so if y'all happen to know bullet hell shooters made with RPG Maker serial, well in Pixel Game Maker MV of grade it would be much more feasible, please feel gratuitous to tell about them in the comments! That is a very interesting and unique topic to attend ^^b)
To run across it with your own eyes, sure y'all are welcome to play the game itself, Digital Soul Data(linked above), it's short, challenging and completely free – "Digital Soul Information is a meridian-downwards bullet hell shooter - play equally a hacker, Mia, who uses avatar NB4 to blast her mode through net and recall her sister's Digital Soul from eternal virtual slavery"
Thanks for all innovative developers who pursuit pushing limits of whatever tool they use and gift the states with surprising games, plugins and truly priceless advice near gam mak!
Source: https://rpgmaker.net/articles/2759/