Frantic 2 Released
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.
August 27th, 2009 at 3:30 pm
Thanks Poly! Was a pleasure helping you out
This game is a heavy improvement over the original! You created 1 monster of a game this time 
It will be very successful. Mark my words!
August 27th, 2009 at 5:37 pm
I agree completely, this will keep all the perfectionists and game freaks busy for a long time.
August 27th, 2009 at 7:24 pm
It was too easy. Really. I almost fell asleep because i didn’t have to be very active. I tried episode 1 and 2 on frantic difficulty, but they were so fking easy so i completed episode 3. And all on frantic difficulty. Seriously you should make some kind of “God” Difficulty which is 3 times harder than frantic. or maybe even 5.
But the game was still ok.
August 27th, 2009 at 7:39 pm
Thats funny cagaroth, i cant see your highscore on any of the episodes on frantic difficulty.
However I am sure you completed them and they were boring and easy but you just forgot to submit your score.
August 27th, 2009 at 9:36 pm
Okai final level no-miss no-bomb video going to youtube now ->
August 27th, 2009 at 9:45 pm
Okay here’s video of mine not getting hit, not using bombs at final level. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1ZU2w3gmQs
Just tell me an episode and stage and i’ll no-miss it. Trust me now that it’s too easy?
August 28th, 2009 at 2:08 am
I challenge you to do the same for all 5 levels in sequence ^^. If thats still too easy for you try and get a score greater than 400 million.
August 28th, 2009 at 4:37 am
it’s absolutely awesome, I didn’t found any shooter that have this type of moving (using the mouse to point somewhere), except Chalk but it’s not really a shooter. Also the option to show the hitbox is awesome, I hate maniacs shooters that dare to have a hitbox =/= to the skin of the plane. I hope you will make a third frantic !
August 28th, 2009 at 7:08 am
Pretty good. The balance is excellent, no matter what Cagaroth says. That said, there are a few problems. First off, a combo is poorly defined. I got the feat that calls for them, but I have no idea how. Secondly, “Special Attribute” is kind of unclear. The balance is good between easy and frantic, but five difficulty settings is a bit much. I noticed a big difference between the two, but pretty minimal between each setting. The game lists my highest multiplier as 100x, but I have not gotten the fast ship. Still, in general, very well done.
August 28th, 2009 at 2:02 pm
Aye, the combos are a bit of a messy mechanic, I didnt really want to remove them though, either way they dont have a huge effect on your score. The multiplier problem on the other hand is weird, Ive never come across it, I can fix it! My logic behind the difficulties was due to not feeling like the easy might be too easy for most, but not easy enough for some, etc, so I just spread them out, although it is a bit fussy lol.
Thanks guys!
August 28th, 2009 at 5:27 pm
does anyone know how you get the huge spread weapon you see in cagaroths video?
I assume it is the classic weapon.
Does it have to be in a certain ship?
Or do you have to pick up all the powerups?
August 28th, 2009 at 6:29 pm
Yup, its the classic weapon, the weapon has to be upgraded fully to look like that, if you play the game in practice mode on any level 5 you can see it there. You dont need any ship, the weapon is buyable with any ship - but it is owned by default by the average and high defense ships.
August 29th, 2009 at 2:09 am
I also can’t get the game to display the high scores, but I have poor internet connection. Might that be an explanation?
I think the bosses for this one are a little bit worse than for the first game. There’s nothing as snazzy and distinctive as the bullet-tunnel boss from the first game here, which is kind of disappointing. Also, I wish you did more with the lasers and missiles. As is, they’re both nearly irrelevant.
In terms of the difficulty,you could probably, to appease the “It’s not as hard as Touhou!” crowd, leave easy the same, make hard the new normal (there’s a pretty small gap as is, and frantic the new hard, with a couple of other ones with faster bullets and constant low health as intense and frantic. I think the difficulty for the game as it stands is fine, but I’m a pretty inexperienced vertical shooter player, and it would go some way towards remedying the very slight difficulty gradient between any two levels.
August 29th, 2009 at 6:33 am
Great, great game. Love the variety in upgrades. The wingman affecting a set area (box set in front of the ship) was especially fun to play with.
Only real complaint is there not being a slow button for keyboard control, or at least I didn’t see one mentioned. Forced me to play with the mouse to graze effectively, which causes occasional slowdowns and is…well, a mouse.
Little things. Liked the power-up system in general, but are three characteristics necessary? Scoring is somewhat haphazard. Chains are not that apparent and seemingly worth little. Where is the No Miss bonus? How about bombs used? Maybe a little more variety amongst the episodes: different number of missions, level layout, or background.
August 29th, 2009 at 3:59 pm
Still, you should make one more difficulty, something like “SATAN” XDd And it’s like 5x harder than frantic, and…. well.. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ztCxpBmXuA 4:40
August 29th, 2009 at 4:46 pm
oh, the whole comment didn’t come =O So that difficulty would not be for scoring, but just beating it. My own shooter games are like frantic 1 and 2 final bosses combined and i can still no-hit them. Even though that difficulty would be not for scoring, some pro players could score it too.
August 29th, 2009 at 4:56 pm
And in that difficulty, you’re not able to destroy boss’s cannons
August 29th, 2009 at 7:50 pm
First off, the cannons of the bosses are often weaker than what they are like without the cannons. Second off, in the case of a few bosses, that would make them literally invincible, as your bullets wouldn’t go through the cannons, and except with a couple special weapons, you would never be able to hurt them.
Five times harder is easy for you to say, but hard to implement. There’s plenty of bullets already in frantic mode, although I suppose a few more could be added. The biggest change would be in speeding up the bullets or decreasing one’s health. The latter would be hard to implement because it goes against the whole point of the shield stat.
And there’s nothing wrong with the game being accessible. For the vast majority of the population, things like what was in that youtube video are too hard to be fun. If he made it as hard as that, there goes 99.9% of his audience. I suppose it would be okay to add something like that in, but NOT at the expense of other stuff.
@Polymerrabbit
There seems to be awfully little variety among the primary weapons. What made you choose them to be the way that they are?
August 29th, 2009 at 7:54 pm
Fantastic game! After finally getting 100 multipler, went to play a game with the last ship,… found a bug. :p
Check out this screenshot: http://i27.tinypic.com/2w6yxog.png
The enemy ships all stayed there. It seems that it kind of froze, looks like I kept getting Close Range Kill over and over again, which in turn maxed out the Tension bar over and over again, increasing the multipler, increasing the amount of points from the continuous killing
So you can try replicate it, here are the settings I was using:
http://i27.tinypic.com/snewaq.png
(I had it like that so I could try and get Solar Panels. Geeze, that’s evil. Can’t seem to get it
It’s the last thing to get til maxed everything :3)
August 29th, 2009 at 9:12 pm
I had tons of ideas for the primary weapons, making them super varied was hard work. The flamethrower was removed at the last minute, I dont know if that was a good idea, altough it kinda looked like it was shooting bubbles >.<. Most of my ideas seemed varied on paper, but were a totally different story when it came to implimenting them. Mainly I didnt want weapons that didnt feel like a shmup, like I could have had weapons that sucked enemies closer, or layed mines, or whatever, but I didnt wanna risk making them seem un-shmupy not to mention unbalancing things.
August 30th, 2009 at 11:13 am
Granted, but there’s plenty of room within the shmup genre. None of these primary weapons really give the impression of you generating your own bullet hell, they all shoot only forwards, and none autotarget. They’re all basically the same. At the very least, the flamethrower would have been fine, for an actual concrete change in gameplay from the other types. As is, I play all of them basically the same. Now, I’m not the best at this sort of game, so a very skilled player might be able to elucidate me as to how such-and-such has a radically different playstyle from the others, but I, as a fairly typical player, don’t see it, so most of your base probably won’t either.
Will there be version 1.1?
August 30th, 2009 at 3:24 pm
Im likely to change the odd bug here and there, but anything that effects high scores cant be changed.
Also, you had to play with the flamethrower to understand why I didnt include it. And the wingmen are auto-targeting weapons, infact the Wingmen have quite a wide variety in terms of how they affect your play. I think the primary weapons would have benifited a bit more from having there style amplified - like the spread shot doing very high spread - the shuriken having giant, but slow bullets.. maybe bullets that dont fire instantly or somthing, and so on.
I think Ive already mentioned, the powerup system is just fussy, I should have just simplified it a bit, but the idea was to spread the power-ups between lots of collectables rather than a few, the idea was good, just the use of the 3 power bars was a bit silly >.<. The combos kinda conflicted with the other scoring mechanisms, instead of plain removing them I kinda tried to make them less obvious, like ‘heres a reward’! Either way I think it turned out a bit poo! (All I had to do was decrease the timer, but this felt usless as the enemies came in waves to short to rack up any interesting combos).
No miss + autofire dont go together well, autofire is quite important to this game, I dont want to force having to use selective fire for highscores. As for the bombs used, the reward for not using bombs is extra points, when your bomb meter is totally full all addrenaline is converted to quite alot of points.
August 31st, 2009 at 4:57 am
Great improvement over the original game. I love this game so much! Thank you for releasing this game!
August 31st, 2009 at 1:09 pm
Why is the main theme music the same as Daniel Remar’s _Iji_?
August 31st, 2009 at 5:36 pm
Wayne - It isnt! Ive just had a good listen to the soundtrack, and dont really see which song you are thinking of.
September 1st, 2009 at 1:20 am
hey.. polymerrabbit nice going wid d game.. can i ask what bands, artist. song, soloist were playing during the game??
September 1st, 2009 at 2:41 am
Sorry, Rabbit. I gave it a listen myself and I was completely wrong. I do still have this really strong feeling I’ve heard this music before, in another game, but as far as I can tell, it wasn’t Iji, and I can’t tell which one it was. My apologies!
September 1st, 2009 at 4:29 am
hilot - Peter from the Felix stuio made the music, you can find his website in this post
September 1st, 2009 at 4:31 am
Ratty - for some reason your post was awaiting my approval, I assume its because there were links in the post, anyway the post is up now.
Try updating to the latest version of flash player, Im having a few people say they have this bug, Im 90% sure its having an out of date flash player. Hopfully!
September 1st, 2009 at 12:14 pm
Hey, Polymer, really great game, it’s really reaffirmed my belief that bullet-hell can be done in Flash! You’ve also given me a bit of motivation, as I’m working on a Flash curtain-fire shmup myself.
Now, I was wondering, have you ever looked into using the Cannon Macro Language? (Found here: http://www.yomogi.sakura.ne.jp/~si/SolidImage/cml/index_e.html ) It’s supposed to be a script used for creating shmups, and the author has made a reference for it in ActionScript 3. Through the examples shown in the CML Workbench, it seems like a pretty versatile and easy to understand (although a little cryptic) language. The only problem is, the actual implementation of it into Flash is a little… weird, and even the source code of the game the author made with it, Arcanacra, doesn’t help much as it was built in Flex. I couldn’t understand it because I haven’t been coding for too long, but if you’re able to get use out of it, I’m sure you could be able to produce a great game.
Anyway, I just wanted to make that known to you if you didn’t know already, and again, great job with the Frantic series. Hopefully, I can learn from your techniques…
September 1st, 2009 at 10:02 pm
Firemaker, I was aware of it there is also somthing called Bullet ML, Im assuming its very similar if not the same language. I havent really looked too much into it, it did look a little confusing from a brief look at it.
I prefer to try and create my own system, although its very hard to get somthing that is easy to use, but equally flexable (either way it beats hand coding the bullets - but if all else fails, this is what I did in Frantic 1 and I think it worked quite well, it just hurt my brain).
September 1st, 2009 at 11:46 pm
Yeah, I’ve seen Bullet ML, though, it looks simpler with it’s XML style, while Cannon is completely original, as well as quite convoluted. Both are very powerful at what they do, regardless.
I never thought of developing a complete system like that; I’ve been using a more template style with set patterns. Thanks for the idea, I’ll fight through the brain hurt, and see what I can do about a flexible system…
September 2nd, 2009 at 12:37 am
‘No Miss’ refers to completing a level without getting hit, not killing all enemies…makes little sense, I know.
XML derivatives are slow and generally include many more features than needed. That said, BulletML and everything else Kenta Cho is amazing. Would love to see a game making full use of it. Just watch the associated java applet demo and you’ll see what I mean. Many creative and strangely organic attack patterns.
If you are to continue the series, a few suggestions on the primary weapon. 1)Mars Matrix Piercing Cannon. 2)Weapons that attack to the side or behind. 3)Weapons which disable adrenaline moves in order to free the mouse button; e.g. donpachi style weapons.
September 2nd, 2009 at 7:12 am
Frantic 2 was a disappointment IMO.
My main complaint is two things:
1) Enemy bullet patterns were less interesting than in Fr1. Everything basically boiled down to one of three things. Either it fires in a pre-set direction all the time, or it always fires directly at you. There weren’t nearly enough bullet tunnels. In addition, the majority of bullets move very slowly with only a few fast moving bullets. While this makes bullet scraping easier to perform, it makes the game less fast paced.
2) Enemy movement patterns are incredibly repetitive. There are tons of columns of enemies coming from exactly the same point, in perfect single file. Give enemies sinusoidal movement, generate them at a moving spawnpoint, have enemies fan out in various patterns, do anything to make them less monotonous. Please!
September 2nd, 2009 at 7:15 am
Slight correction to above post: three things includes missiles - bullets only seem to follow one of two patterns. (fires in one direction or fires at player)
Bullet tunnels are entirely lacking from Fr2 and several bosses fire patterns that look like they should form a tunnel but don’t. Fr2 is also lacking the classic spread-fire.
September 2nd, 2009 at 8:27 am
well polymer ,great game but once i finish a level and im eady to start the next one the “press space bar to start” thing comes up ,but no matter how much i press game wont continue.
September 2nd, 2009 at 8:28 am
agh i butchered my grammar there.
September 2nd, 2009 at 9:53 pm
drac - you may need to click on the screen with your mouse first, flash might be loosing focus, I dont know what might cause this, possibly a bug.
pf - I dont know how during all the insanity of designing this game I didnt include any bullets that dont move directly forward >.<. Piercing cannon + dodonpachi style slowing should have been in Frantic 2 really, I think for future games Im just going to start from a fresh canvas, trying to bring over systems from an earlier game to make it a ‘proper’ sequel just messes things up.
PiousFlea - This problems are generally caused by the lack of user friendlyness and general flaws in my editors and systems in general. In hindsight I should have focused more on emitters (of enemies and bullets) and how they move, and how the movement is defined, it took so long and was so hard to actually get a level created within my system that I was too limited (its actually a similar story with Frantic 1, except that game was much simpler).
I think a ‘directed’ generative system of some sort will create immense beauty with very little effort, although working these problems out is a different story.
September 3rd, 2009 at 8:26 am
hi poly
just wanted to drop a quick note that I very much enjoy this game. I’ll let others deliberate on its flaws, but I find it quite fun
September 3rd, 2009 at 12:25 pm
Is it just me or did the game get slower?
Anyways not really a fan of some of the new upgrades. (Also at this point it would probably be safe to get rid of either lives or health altogether)
As for scrapping and associated bonuses - this is just a terrible mechanic imo - the game doesn’t necessarily get better because there are more ways to score multipliers…
September 3rd, 2009 at 5:37 pm
I really want to know what that music during the game is called, it’s awesome! It would be great if there was a download of it, I’d listen to it all day. Stupendous game, especially like the scraping of bullets part.
September 3rd, 2009 at 5:47 pm
jacob - Thanks.
Aa - Yes the game is slightly slower, trying to satisfy everyones taste is impossible lol. I personally enjoyed alot of the testing and playing around with the game, maybe Im just building a game to my taste, or trying at leaste.
September 4th, 2009 at 4:17 am
I personally like scrapping as it encourages a more dangerous game play style with better rewards.
So, here’s my review. I’ve beaten every episode on medium, one on hard, working on unlocking the last feat (beat an episode on frantic). I’ve also played quite a few different Touhou games. I’m not that great, beating a game on easy is usually an accomplishment for me, and there’s only one game I’ve ever beaten on normal difficulty and that’s Touhou 8 (imperishable night).
The difficulty feels about right to me. There are options to make the game harder, such as the one that lowers you to one hit point in exchange for making your guns do more damage, which is nice.
It’s the only flash shooter I’ve played that performs anywhere close to what I want. Most suck, this game is fun.
It’s a pretty good shump. All the important mechanics are there, which makes it pretty fun.
The only thing I’d suggest is to make the bullet patterns more artsy. Like not just tossing bullets at you, but making the patterns fairly pleasing to the eye while you do it. Sorta like Touhou. It’s fun just watching people play that game because of that.
Overall though a good fun game. I’m definately inspired to make something of my own.
September 4th, 2009 at 7:47 pm
September 4th, 2009 at 9:23 pm
BUT I STILL FRIKIN’ WANT HARDER MODE THAN FRANTIC. I WANT MUSHIHIMESAMA-LIKE BOSSES. AAAAAAAARRRRRRR
September 4th, 2009 at 9:29 pm
I want a marble water fountain in my living room :’(
September 4th, 2009 at 9:56 pm
You should get one?
September 4th, 2009 at 9:57 pm
I just noticed that you should make cagaroth-private version which is 2x as speedy as normal frantic 2. =)))) Just speed it up like 2 times. The whole game.
September 5th, 2009 at 1:10 am
The only major issue I really see is that the screen could be a bit bigger or enemies could be a bit smaller, though I bet that’d make the game harder to run on man different screen resolutions and so on.
The only other gripe is that it seems like there isn’t enough flak from user bullets to make it easy to kill all the units. Maybe I wasn’t using the right bullet settings.
September 5th, 2009 at 4:51 am
Have you ever though about making this for a platform say dsiware or iphone.
September 5th, 2009 at 6:16 am
The Game and the music are really great. One of the best flash games i ever played. I would give it 10 of 10.
The spread weapon is a bit to strong at higher power lvls.
The last boss of ep 3 felt somehow easier than some bosses before him. Too much room to evade there. Other than that it was flawless. Made me play evry episode a few times xD
September 5th, 2009 at 5:27 pm
http://kotaku.com/5347591/nintendo-brings-shmup-to-dsiware-yes-nintendo
I think dsi ware requires expensive development kits, I have no idea if I can develope things for the iPhone, it looks interesting - how would a bullet hell work when you cant see the bullets for your finger/pen lol.
September 5th, 2009 at 7:51 pm
srry for not posting earlier great game polymer.
September 7th, 2009 at 1:34 am
Just wanted to say this is absolutely great polymerrabbit. Been waiting for this a long time. The depth and breadth of the game is fantastic.
September 21st, 2009 at 1:00 am
My game crashes shortly after I start it up. Help!
September 25th, 2009 at 2:45 am
Thank you for this new Frantic
Another great shoot, the falsh version of dodonpachi XD
Now I’m going to play See ya !!!
September 26th, 2009 at 1:07 am
Amazing improvement over Frantic 1. In order to please Caragoth, I think that you should simply add a “beyond the impossible” difficulty level which is only unlocked upon “Unharmed” clearing all 3 acts on Frantic, in which the bullets go twice as fast and you have half the health.
Maybe that’ll please him >.<…
September 27th, 2009 at 2:02 am
Some improvements for Frantic 3 if I may suggest them…
1) More music. The same stuff over and over (no matter how amazing) will eventually get tiring. Newgrounds has *plenty* of great, free music, specifically designed for flash games.
2) A lot of weapons (both primary and secondary) are antithetical to the shmup, the point of which is to keep yourself alive while letting weapons take things out ASAP without having to fly any fancier to make use of them. To this extent, only the spread and beam are good primaries, and only missiles and lasers are good secondaries. The rest of the stuff requires too much effort in terms of flying specifically to make the weapons most effective.
3) Some of the miscellaneous cards are pointless, period, while others are so situational that they’re not worth the one-of-three slot spaces. The absolutely pointless one is the adrenaline-for-wingman-power item. The loss of a panic button is terrible, considering that regularly, it may mean the difference between 50% of your score, or if going for an unharmed run with the all-health-for-added-power item, a loss of a life.
In terms of the “simply not worth the slot” items, they are anything besides the money combination (magnet/chance of more money/combo money), or, if you bought all you needed, the speed up/missile scramble/adrenaline cards. Well, that is, except for the “higher chance of purples” in some cases.
4) Add a background already! And a cheap story with lots of Engrish!
April 18th, 2010 at 5:34 pm
Very nice man!!! MORE MORE MORE prob most entertaining game ive played that is around the same basic idea- more please, more maps, powers, ships. LEVELS!!!!!!