Sacred Curry Shooter - beta 0.5.1

Thanks!

Your menu screen is already more impressive than mine ever will be, oh ho ho ¬u¬

I've actually been thinking of doing a sequel to this; something with easier controls (as roebros mentioned a while back, the charge attack is really opaque) and better content handling. I have the base code on my hard drive already, come to think of it...hmm...

Not bad! I like the Touhou games. I remember playing an earlier version of this, you've added more enemies and bullets by the looks of it =p I'm actually making a similar game as a side project in XNA...

http://img696.imageshack.us/img696/3672/psb2.png
http://img35.imageshack.us/img35/1003/psb.png

It's got a little while to go until its as pretty as yours, though.. xP

@roebros:
I'm not sure what I changed, actually. Glad it works now :)

Ah, there's something that needs to be documented a little better--Every time one of your bullets hits an enemy, your charge goes up by one. When it reaches 100, pressing 'z' will release an uber-powerful attack--However, because it goes back down to 0 every time you die, it's not really something players can be expected to figure out on their own... Hm.

Ah, yes--Framerate inconsistency is a problem here. However, I don't think it's a huge issue, seeing as I know games in this genre that range from 60 FPS to 20, and still play just fine ;)

It works now - well done :)
My only complaint is that some of the controls feel kinda awkward (I couldn't figure out what z did at all) and it got kind of funny feeling when a lot of enemies got on screen at once...

Other than that, well done on keeping the game moving pretty well even with a ton of sprites :)

Hm... Okay, I'm gonna have to find a way to kill that folder. Thanks for pointing it out!

Try running it directly via your terminal/whatever you have on Windows (Like, "python main.py"). That should work... And, I'm going to go into my Emacs' config and see if I can get it to use just spaces/just tabs. Should be pretty easy to do.
Again, thanks for bringing it up! :)

Good for the background class - that is a good solution.

The __MACOSX folder was pretty much empty I think, but yeah, anyone not on Mac will see it and wonder ;)

I use the python interpreter itself, or IDLE (more generally, as it runs every time) - it does not support mixing of spaces/tabs anymore for indentation, probably because it is so strongly advised against in the Python Docs (ie, it is considered poor coding style, if not crashing IDLE - lol)
They occur everywhere, which to me indicates that IDLE is having a hard time determining the correct indentation amount, and is flagging everything, if I go through and indent on my own it works though...

@roebros:
For the background--I know how to do it, and the code is all in place. I don't use a background class, I have it be a stored string for each of the level classes, but yeah. It's just laziness on my part that's prevented me from implementing it.
Actually, you don't even have to blit multiples--You can just change the coordinates every 500 refreshes or whatever ;)

What __MACOSX folder? I'm going to assume that it's a byproduct of the fact that I use Mac OS X, but... What's in it?

Indentation errors? Weirdness. It works just fine for me.
I'm writing this with a copy of Emacs that "understands" Python, and yes, it does mix tabs and spaces... This shouldn't be a problem, though. What are you running? And are you sure the file downloaded OK? (I just did my tests on the one I downloaded from SourceForge, rather than the DV copy on my hard disc)
Also, could you give me some specific locations of the indent errors? Were they at the start of functions? If so, which functions?
Thanks!

Ok, well, first you should remove the __MACOSX folder from the zipfile...
Second, I couldn't play, indentation errors throughout, so I am assuming you mixed spaces and tabs? I dunno though...

For an animated background, you could simply make it so you have several images about twice the width and height of the map (assuming you want horizontal movement, otherwise make the width the same as the play area), then animating them is really simple.

Just make a class Background, that will load all background#.png (or whatever) files in your directory, then have it blit the one on screen and the one above it (that way when the first is halfway gone the second is being shown,etc..)

If you would like some example code I can help, as I have done this several time with good results :)

Looks good though, downloading now to try it ;)

Hey, thanks for the feedback! I'm always worried that I'll start missing stuff as I get wrapped up in coding.

@1: This is big on my list, but, unfortunately, not likely to happen very soon--I'm still debating how exactly I want to handle it, and I'm not the greatest background artist in the world. But, I'll bump it up on my priorities. Thanks!

@2: Me too, actually. I always play curtain shooters with a gamepad. I'm thinking I want to make everything completely user-definable, actually--Have a menu where you input keys for commands. I'll want to read up on writing data to files, but this goes up on my list... Thanks!

I can think of 2 things to add:

1: An animated background. The good shmups have moving backgrounds that a) make it look like the "ship" is actually moving, b) make it look even cooler complimenting the trippy bullet patterns, and c) making the game even harder.

2: Mouse support. This game is pretty much impossible (for me anyway) without a gamepad mapped to the move keys.

Oh, thanks! I'm thinking this is pretty close to "completion", but I can still add content...

Hi, this is an amazing game so far! I love shmups and I'll be watching this project for sure.

By the way, I replied to your comment on my page: http://www.pygame.org/project/677/. Send me an email sometime so we can talk about working together.

And really man...keep up the great work.