Orcpost
Posted: August 30, 2024
Last Updated: August 30, 2024
BULLET HELL! You know bullet hells, right – those games where you dodge bad things that mean guys shoot at you? Games like “Touhou” or its close competitor “Greggmas Saga: July’s Rebuke: Panasonic Heaven Excel”.
I like these games. Granted, I almost never played them in the past, but I do enjoy looking at the pretty patterns they make. With this frustratingly vague enjoyment and a looped 5-hour Touhou x Space Jam remix playlist as my fuel, I even made a bullet hell with the help of some vocally endowed friends.
This turned out great with zero regrets nor any notes for improvement, but it would only scratch my itch for so long. For the next couple years, I started and abandoned multiple projects in various forms for another bullet hell game and kept running into the same problem: I want more bullets.
It’s not enough to just use one bullet. We need more. And thus my quest for bullets began that would evolve into a work-in-progress fully-fledged bullet hell maker that could handle most any bullet pattern needs using a combination of an Entity Component System (ECS) framework, multithreading, and a lot of hitting my head on walls.
More bullets…
Still not enough to make me happy…
That’s a bit more like it!
All this just to say: the rest of this blog series is about the various technical challenges associated with creating a bullet hell with an “adequate” number of bullets to fulfill my sadistic gameplay (and pretty pattern) requirements. Many of these problems I tackled when I was still in an exploratory phase, before I took a slightly more serious approach to documenting my travels, so this will be updated with a combination of posts about the significant “finished” concepts along with the newer week-to-week kind of updates on current problems. Here’s a very brief sampler of patterns to hopefully pique your interest:
80 bullets…
800 bullets…
11,000 bullets…
One of many cool patterns you can make.