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.
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.
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.
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.
Ive come across a huge flaw in the design of the Frantic 2 code. Im working on fixing it but from my estimates, and running lots of tests, Im pretty sure Im going to have to re-code the whole ‘core’ of the game. The problem doesnt stop the game from working or cause any major crashes or anything, but its big enough to warrant scrapping everything Ive done so far.
Ive done a lot of research and its a problem that is pretty obscure to spot, and will only occur 5-20 minutes into gameplay at random. I know how to fix it, but the effort I would put into fixing it would be little less than starting from scratch, what Ive learnt from making Frantic 2 will no doubt improve any systems I write in the revised version. I also have a plan for making the game run alot more smoothly, allowing me to add more silly effects, enemies and bullets.
Its not all as bad as it seems, most of the work in Frantic 2 so far has been in the design and tweaking of the subtle mechanics, creating and putting the graphics into the game, creating the menus, and a bunch of other things I can simply drag and drop into the new version. Not to mention I have a set of working level editors built into the game.
Hopfully it wont be too big of a delay for the sequel, as Ive got most of the games logic fresh in my mind and should easily be able to re-code it. I dont want to release a ‘broken’ or less than perfect game. Ill post an update when Ive made more progress.
Ok as promised here are a few screenshots, I tried to get good ones but its so hard with all the different things going on. I just wanted to show some of the interesting weapons and enemies. Keep in mind alot of this stuff isnt from the final game, its still being made, and there are just a few random enemies on screen. And the bullet patterns are just little tests.
The laser and rocket enemies, the lasers can rotate, the rockets will home in on you untill close then ‘deactivate’. Here im using the ‘ray’ wingman and ‘classic’ primary weapon:
This was my poor attempt at showing the bullet scraping effects, the bullets were moving fast so its quite hard lol, also there are 2 other special enemies. One explodes on death destroying things within range of the blast, the other causes your bullets to gravitate towards it when its active:
This is just the Rocket bomb, it isnt really being shown in full because most of the enemies are already dead, but in the actual game the rockets will always hit every enemy on screen, making it fun to watch when the screen is full of enemies:
The last one is the meteor attack, this looks better when its actually moving lol:
Ive made all the special enemies now, they still need a bit of extra work but Ive narrowed it down to 7. The 3 I removed were a teleporting enemy, it just wasnt very fun and kinda felt too random. An enemy that aims at the player, all enemies now have the ability to aim at the player so that enemy was pointless. The last was a panic enemy, this just speeds up and fires lots of bullets at low health. I thought it was also pointless and kinda hard to notice among the chaos.
I can start making maps soon, once Ive got an editor and smoothed out a few un-polished bits of the core of the game. Also I think Ive decided on a system for the bosses, but Ill keep it a secret for now. It should be extremly cool.
Frantic 2 is now deep into development so I thought Ide give a quick update and detail some features. Ill stick some screenshots up in the near future to show how its coming along.
The new weapons in Frantic 2 will include:
Primary:
Shuriken - Focused quick firing large projectiles, that travel through enemies on hit, so you can line your enemies up for more efficient shots.
Classic - A classic spread weapon, similar to Frantic 1, only a little more damaging and well balanced.
Wave - Bullets that move in a wave motion, the wave becomes more focused when the weapon is upgraded.
Curving - Bullets that curve off to the sides as you move, pretty much a novelty weapon but quite powerful.
Flame thrower - A close range heavily damaging weapon. Looks cool too 
The 5 primary weapons each have 3 statistics that can level up 10 times, these are bullet movment speed, rate of fire and ’spread’ which alters the weapon depending on its type, for example spread gives the shuriken bullets more ‘health’ before they are destroyed. The maximum level will be limited by the level of card for that specific weapon. So a level 1 card will only allow 6 upgrades (2,2,2) and at level 4 (8,8,8) = 24.
The Wingmen:
Rocket, Laser, Ray, Electric and Targeted. I wont go into details about these, but they are fun I promise. Each wingman will have 5 levels, each level will alter the weapons behavour so it dishes out more damage.
There are 5 ships balanced for Speed, Armour and Initial weapon, each ship also has its own unique ‘bomb’ attack. Including the beam from the first game, I couldnt remove it lol. The others include a massive rocket attack, an allied ‘boss’ ship, a meteor shower and a black hole.
The addrenaline bar is also different, it now has 2 ‘tiers’ its basically like 2 addrenaline bars stacked on top of one another, with 3 attacks each, so if you save up to 4 bars you can do the bomb attack followed by a sheild powerup right afterwards. The ‘bombs’ are very brief and pretty much just clear the screen and give you a quick break from dodging if things get hard. The other addrenaline attacks are a temporary sheild like the origional game, it just absorbs health. And slow motion, which I origioanlly took out of Frantic 1, but that was before I made the boss bullets curtains. Its fun to go from slow to fast motion during one of those lol.
Ive also added a ‘tension bar’ this goes down naturally over time, but doing stunts fills it up, once its full your mutiplier goes up by 1. You can scrape bullets, get close ranged kills and combos to increase the bar. This completly changes the scoring mechanics of the game, I think its alot more ‘focused’ now, not just a matter of using the money shield in combination with not getting hit, and just generally killing everything - killing a specific enemy early might actually decrease the scoring potential. Also there is a bit of punishment for using the bombs. The addrenaline rises pretty quickly, but once its full all addrenaline is converted into points.
There is 15 ‘other’ cards that just give random little bonuses and power ups. Im not 100% on what they will be yet, I have 15 planned but Ill probably replace a few as I think they might ruin the delicate scoring mechanics.
The enemies are alot more complex now, they can fire bullet patterns that are actually as impressive as the boss patterns. Also there will be 10 ‘unique’ enemies, I might scrap a couple of them if they arnt fun to blow up.
Im still undecided on how the bosses will work, I have tons of ideas, so far I think the best thing is to have a boss that you can tear apart pixel by pixel. Within limits obviously lol.
Argh this is ‘quick update’ is getting a bit long, Ill leave it there. Ill get some screenshots up once the enemies are in and I can give a proper preview.
Im currently in the process of creating Frantic 2. I also have a few vague plans for different types of games.Frantic 2 should be quite different to the origional, with Frantic 1 I was quite lazy, cut corners and rushed things a bit near the end. So hopfully I can make Frantic 2 what I origionally intended for and better. Ive had sooooo much possitive feedback from all over, in fact barley any of the feedback is negative, which is suprising for the internet. So ill take all the feedback and critizism and make a giant list of stuff to make!
Erm… one feature I might possibly add to Frantic 2 is an episode system, each week a new episode of levels and possibly storyline, dialogue and content will be added to a server, which will update inside the game. So in the long run ill be able to make TONS of new stuff. Ive had no experience with PHP or MYSQL so that should be interesting. Also Im working on tools to make editing levels etc for the game much faster and more controlled. So I dont have to sit for hours altering numbers - not fun.
I decided to get a blog.. wooo.
