About speed setting in 2d shmup games

[xmzhang Profile]

I am doing my own 2d shoot them up game, and I really have no experience, really hope someone kindly give me some advice. Now I meet a problem about setting speed in my game, exactly the player speed and bullet speed. My game screen is 600 px * 800 px, player hit box is 8 px * 8 px. FPS is 60.0, I set player speed 4 px(or 5 px) per frame, that 240 px (300 px) per second. and the bullet speed is 5 px to 7 px per frame, that is 300 px to 420 px per second. I am not sure it is OK or not, or I am totally wrong in this way.

[monoRAIL]

Those numbers sound pretty good. It's usual for the enemy bullets in shmups to be a similar speed to the player, with some of them faster and some of them slower. The player's bullets are usually extremely fast, 5 or 10 times faster than the enemy bullets. There are no exact rules though, you just have to decide what feels right for your game.

Remember to keep the player's speed the same when traveling diagonally (by multiplying the horizontal and vertical motion by 0.7).

[xmzhang Profile]

[monoRAIL]

When you have a prototype working with the bullets moving, post a video - even if it doesn't have any final artwork it's still useful to judge the relative speeds. Guessing from the raw numbers is never as good as seeing the thing in motion.

[xmzhang Profile]

[monoRAIL]

Here are some free pixel-art ships from the old forum. http://cokane.com/shmupdevarchive/index ... pic=1693.0

[xmzhang Profile]

[monoRAIL]

Again, it's hard to judge without seeing the scale of everything, or some motion. But my initial thought is that when the player taps the key, their ship shouldn't move by more than half its size. So if the ship is 30 pixels across, and I tap the key and it moves 15 pixels, that seems ok. But if the ship is smaller this will feel too fast.

Don't worry about the specific numbers at the start. Just write up the code to get the player and enemies and bullets working, then adjust the numbers to make it feel right once it's playable.

[xmzhang Profile]