Frantic 2 is now available to play here!!!!

Have fun and let me know what you think!

I would like to thank Peter - Felix Studio, for creating the awsome soundtrack for Frantic 2. He was really proffessional, fast and made super cool music

I would also like to thank Friz for being so heavily involed with the development and spending so much time helping me improve Frantic 2.

Friz has managed to complete the whole game without being hit in Frantic difficulty mode, and recorded the whole damn thing onto Youtube!

Also thanks to everyone who helped out with the beta and have given input and support during development.

For starters : Frantic 2 will be released Thursday 27th August!

Ok now to the problem Im facing. Initially I thought it was impossible to get the score beyond the point where the numbers in flash are forced into negatives, or back around to zero. I decided to go into the game and try my hardest to ‘abuse’ the scoreing mechanisms, by farming bullet scrapes/grazing, killing all enemies at as close range as possible, and focusing all my shop purchases on things that would make this more efficient. So one example is not using wingmen and having it so I can kill selectivly, making sure I always have bullets around to increase my multiplier.

I wasnt skilled enough to really push the multiplier to its potential in the normal modes, but I got it to around 140 before I managed to get myself hit. I tried the same thing in Endurance mode and it got to around 300-400 a few times after getting hit, but it took about 4 levels to get it that high. This suggests a very very skilled player could get the multiplier high enough to break the highscores.

The scoring system iteself is very balanced, and it is actually as low as it will go, for example scraping a bullet will give you 1 point, killing an enemy say 400, a boss 4000, etc.. if I lower these scores the game will give no reason to actually kill enemies, as scraping bullets itself would be profitable enough to not even bother with enemies, and bosses would just be roadblocks to get to more bullets. I cant limit the multiplier as skilled players would not be rewarded, and highscores would plateau.

So what to do! My current and only solution would be to have a counter, once it counts to say 100, the actual score is increased by 1(c-=100; s++;), effectivly dividing the score by 100 and making it impossible to get game breaking score. The downside to this is now players wont get ridiculous highscores on average. From testing it seems players get between 50-200 million points on a first attempt. This would now be a boring 0.5-2 million, 2 million being more rare than those around 0.5. But this would convert a v.v.high 10,000,000,000(breaks scoreboard) into a 100,000,000(fine).

Is there a better solution? I really dont want to have to make the scores boring and low, pfft, who wants a tiny 0.5 million score!

Based on feedback Ive recieved so far Ive started making a few changes to the game. The main one is obviously difficulty, I like that the game has high difficulty as Ive played it ALOT, and its alot more fun to test things when I find them challenging. But obviously its not ideal, so Ive decided to seperate the game into 5 diffuculties. This is a bit extreme but I want to make sure theres always a challenging mode for people who wanna replay the game many times, but I also want to make sure the game is alot easier in the easier modes, as it is I think its too hard, especially in comparison to Frantic 1.

Ok, theres many other smaller changes, Ive changed how fast the coins move, there is now an option for a black background ( I gave in ). The levels will be altered to give a slower start. All levels will be polished up so that killing every enemy is actually possible, and things are a little less ‘jerky’. Some of the in level bullet patterns will probably be toned down and tweaked a little.

All the bosses released in the Beta version will be either replaced for fixed up so they arnt as cheap, and the balance will be sorted out ( boss 3 wont be impossible lol). Also the minibosses will be given less health. The bosses will actually convert bullets in to coins as in Frantic 1. Ill also be balancing the weapons up a bit. Not to mention a ton of other polish related things.

Finished 9 new bosses today, just in the process of making sure they are balanced and fun in each difficulty.

Prolly upload a gameplay video later if I find the time, and energy lol.

A poorly made preview of a boss in Frantic 2. The music is called Devourer by Devastus.This doesnt really represent the final game but it gives you a good idea, its boss 3, in hard mode:

Ive released the early closed beta to the people who contacted me, if I havent contacted you and should have just gimme a reminder at my email in the about section, or here if I already have your address.

Feel free to post feedback here if youde rather not email me.

Im currently busy making the boss editor, I figured if I want the boss making process to run smoothly (im making 30 unique bosses) I should have a decent editor. This has turned out to be ALOT more complicated than I origionally thought. I knew the bosses were complex, but making somthing that edits these complex bosses adds alot of.. well.. complexity. The editor is only partly complete, I still have to add the ability to edit the bosses parameters, add and modify turrets.. and on top of all that edit the bullet patterns - which alone is a nice bit of coding madness.

 Boss Editor screenshot

As you can imagion this is pretty fun to play with, I might release both my level editor and boss editor on the release of Frantic 2 to just to see what crazy creations people can come up with, although theres alot of things stopping this from being easy, sharing the map data, and playing other peoples maps is not really supported by the games code. Although releasing a player level pack is tempting if enough good levels are made. Or maybe just a series of bosses, as making and playing bosses is a hell of alot more fun than making levels.

Ill begin the beta testing once Ive got some fun working bosses.

Im doing a small early beta test, if youve shown interest or have interest and I havent already contacted you I apologize. Im very busy at the moment and Im struggling to keep track of all the people who have contacted me.

If I havent contacted you post here or send me an email (chui at live .co. uk).

This is early beta testing, the game is quite a mess and I dont wanna just throw it out into the open untill a few people with interest have had a play with it and told me everything Im doing wrong. Also its probably got a few bugs in it that need sorting out.

As Ive said im really busy so youll have to be patient with me.

As for as progress with the game, still making levels, playing with boss ideas, generally messing about with all the different systems in the game. So not much to say really, lots to do though!

I thought I better write another update on the progress of Frantic 2. At the moment Im putting stats and feats into the game. The idea is the game will track certain stats, like amount of kills at close range, or how many seconds total youve spent scraping bullets. Over time these will mount up and reward you with a feat. Each feat will unlock either a new ship, buyable card in the shop, slot in the shop or a new game mode to try.

So far my extra game modes are Arcade - this just removes the shop from the game and buys all your stuff automatically, for people who dont wanna go shopping mid-blasting-spree. Another mode is bosses - fight all the bosses in the game back to back. Ill probably add automatic weapon upgrading, or start you with a good set of upgrades from the beginning, with upgrades earnt in level. These two modes are always unlocked.

The unlockable modes are Survival - this will allow you to play a ‘bonus’ level that just has a stupid amount of money being dropped. Once youve finished this short level youll be given one chance to buy all your weapons and cards, then youll be given a randomly generated level which will get harder every minute or two. The difficulty will begin to sky rocket making it quite impossible to survive.

The other mode is endurance,  this mode  just allows you to play every level from the game back to back. The levels are organised into 3 ‘episodes’, each once contains 5 levels and should last about 20 minutes play time… give or take. So 1 hour of bullet insanity should class as endurance I think.You will play level 1 - episode 1 in easy mode, lvl1 ep2 in medium and lvl1 ep3 in hard, and so on. I might also restrict the amount of money earnt so you dont end up with the highest powered weapons by level 2.

Ive slimmed down the bosses quite alot since I started making them, I soon realised that the bosses weapons were waaay too complicated. So ive made only a few turret types, two that disable your weapons/wings while active, a laser, rockets, one that will repair the boss while active, and the standard weapon turret that will fire bullet sequences.

So all in all the game is pretty much coded. I have to make all the levels and get some sounds in, and I still have to find some music. Hopfully level editing is easier than predicted and I can make more than 3 episodes. Ide love to have more, but it all depends on how tiring the whole process is.

Ill post some screenshots of the bosses, and some real gameplay soon.

Ive never found such a rewarding bug:

Not only was I collecting 1000s of gold a second it made me realise how damn fun it is to collect 1000 gold a second, oh and I was LITTERALLY killing 100s of enemies a second which is less fun than you would think lol. The fps was pretty solid (15-28) considering I was getting a 1000 combo every few seconds and there must be 100s of wingman projectiles and countless collision detections going on.  I might have to tweak my scroing, 1 billion points within a few minutes.. I dont think the variable types in flash have the capacity to store much more than 3 billion.

I wish all bugs were this fun.

 Well for the bosses Ive had a few ideas. My main plan was to go with a system with a central boss that is surrounded by satalites, each of the satalites would move in formation with its surrounding satalites and do different things each level. After a load of thought Ive decided to go with a more  ‘Warning Forever’ style boss system. The problem with the Warning Forever system is it works in the opposite way to a typical scroller, in that as you dismantle the boss, it gets weaker. I dont really have any ‘elegant’ solution to this so my system will basically use modifiers to alter the behavour of each turret as the other turrets die. The idea is to spread power over the boss almost evenly, there are 10 turrets doing 10 scary things, and you destroy 3 of them, I want the other 7 turrets to do dispraportionatly more damage than they did alongside the ones you destroyed. This way the boss will slowley get harder.

Its a little more complicated than that though, the central ‘hub’ of the boss will have a seperate health bar, getting the hub health to around 50% will automatically start blowing up parts of the boss. Once the boss hits another % possibly 30, all the parts will blow up automatically giving you a ton of powerups to collect before the central boss enters its beserk mode. This is a pure straight forward bullet hell sequence, It should be quite alot harder than the rest of the bosses life span, but will only last a short time. Now, to make this system worth while from a scoring point of view, if you dismantle the boss early, its health will stay the same, so if you never hit the center, but completly remove all the bosses outer parts, the boss enters beserk mode - very early. The up side to this is the turrets never have to self destruct, and you get a ton of points. Also by destroying the outer -> inner nodes of the boss you get even more points, which means holding fire untill the moment were the boss just gives you a quick peek of its outer most turrets, on the harder bosses at least :P.

Anyway thats my system, oh I forgot to mention I have roughly 16 unique turrets down on paper, obviously 16 is a lot and some turrets might be scrapped or altered, but theres more than enough variety if I combine the turrets in different ways for interesting challenges. My aim with the bosses is basically to have a system that is quite flexable and easy to understand from an editing perspective, and also to make sure the bosses are fun alone, the game doesnt need any actual levels, just bosses to stand on its own feet.

Ugh long post, heres a CONCEPT of the bosses I would like, It may look nothing like this in game, I just wanted to make sure its going to look damn cool. I think its better to go with  vector graphics as apposed to bitmaps due to them rotating without going a bit blurry, although a bit of detail is lost, I think the added functionality of this system is worth paying the price of a bit of fine detail.

Boss Concept

Oh and my system should hopfully allow for bosses that span many screens, I will have to test it from a performance perspective, so its not deffinate, but if it works these bosses truly will be Massive Entities I shall update again once Ive made more progress.