Yesterday I finally released Hyperdrive, with very good reception.
So far there are a few short YouTube videos with a bit of gameplay, which was expected: getting to understand the game and get further of the first boss requires some time. Hopefully later on we will see longer videos with people completing the game.
The YouTuber Xyphoe featured the game in his AMSTREAM last night, and it was very fun to watch and participate on the chat. Some takeaways:
- People like the game, appreciating the technical part.
- In general, they expect a regular shot’em up and the chain base power-up system is a bit confusing at first.
- Once it clicked for Xyphoe, he got hooked.
- When the weapon is not powerful enough –until level 3 or so–, is better to use “precision” by pressing fire when needed; later is OK to keep pressing fire and use a more “burst” approach.
- When a life is lost, the weapon is downgraded; if the player doesn’t go back to “precision”, the game ends pretty quickly!
- Xyphoe collected bombs, but he never remembered that he could use them to save tricky situations –probably because getting chains requires a lot of focus–.
In a way, this feels quite a lot like play-testing, although it is happening once the game is finished.
Other than that, I have fixed a small bug related to timing in the menu screen. I have three reports, including myself, of people playing the game on a real CPC not experiencing any issues –I’m assuming that CRTs can be quite permissive–, but the person reporting the issue explained it with a lot of detail and I agree that there was a problem (I was generating 304 lines instead of the expected 312 in a 50Hz output). Anyway, it is fixed now and version 1.0.1 is available to download.