Bullet Revolution

Welcome to my blog about Bullet Revolution. Bullet Revolution is (going to be) a bullet-hell  game I'm developing in XNA 4.0. Since this is my first game, there is a lot of learning to do. I often run into problems I hadn't foreseen, but I find a solution most the the time.

I found myself talk to nobody on Google+ often, and that is not a joke stating Google+ has no users. It is just, explaining a problem really helps in finding yourself an answer. That's why I started this blog, so I can use the internet to explain my problems to and giving thanks you all you lovely internet users by providing my answer to the people of the internets. Of course, since I am a beginner myself all my provided answers should be taken with a grain of salt. But I will do my utmost best in providing a right answer.



Another reason is for me is to just naturally recording my progress of learning and creating this game. As something to look back upon later, or to simply use as a reference.

Anyhow, since I already planned a little bit of what I'm going to do. Which is pretty hard if you don't really know what you are doing exactly.

What actually inspired me for creating this game is, besides writing a game at all is the game Jamestown. Which was actually my first bullet-hell game I ever played, how could such a genre escape my attention for so long. The genre itself mostly seems popular in Japan but has its fans in western countries, like anything. After playing Jamestown I started looking up some more games like this on YouTube. There are some amazing Japanese games making the player dodge stunning bullet patterns really defining the term bullet-hell. This really got me interested in the internal working of SHMUPs like this. Which the most interesting and obvious one being, how do they create such beautiful patterns?

With that thought, I just started looking up some source code of some SHMUP games, but all games I found on Google Code were pretty western, mostly representing a game called 1942, so no luck there. I did actually found somethings that are interesting. Something called BulletML, which is a way of describing these patterns in  XML. A demo is available here, it's really fun to play around with.

Most bullet-hell SHMUPs seem to prefer to define their levels in XML files or scripts. I also found a different approach used by smealum for his awesome game Arsenal DS by using a level editor. I know this is not an alternative to BulletML and I don't even know how he's saving his data, might even be XML. But this is what I like about it, providing tools to create patterns, rails, enemies and timelines. All (supposed) XML is hidden and can be as complex as you want, or even better, just generated by XNA.

So that's what I decided to do. Most of my design would still work, which I may explain in a later post.

However this will add a lot more work for me to do, but will also allow me to learn even more about creating applications in WinForms.

And with that I would like to end my post. That and it's getting pretty late here (00:53AM) and it's back to school tomorrow.