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[SixMachine]

Goddamnit, I decided to give this a try since I fooled around with Gamemaker before. I made a twinstick shooter where you can curve lasers and bounce bullets off walls, but I forgot the "Halloween" part haha. Also my spriting sucks.

 

[Wyndstryker]

Goddamnit, I decided to give this a try since I fooled around with Gamemaker before. I made a twinstick shooter where you can curve lasers and bounce bullets off walls, but I forgot the "Halloween" part haha. Also my spriting sucks.

Change your sprites to witches and your technology to magic and you're good to go.

 

[SixMachine]

Change your sprites to witches and your technology to magic and you're good to go.

Well I guess if you can consider a stick figure a witch. My drawing skills haven't progressed since the 2nd Grade...

Also how are you guys doing on music? I currently suck at music too. It makes it really feel dead with nothing to listen to.

 

[Wyndstryker]

Well I guess if you can consider a stick figure a witch. My drawing skills haven't progressed since the 2nd Grade...

Also how are you guys doing on music? I currently suck at music too. It makes it really feel dead with nothing to listen to.

Just give it a triangle hat and you're good to go for a witch!

 

[Noaloha]

Another option is not even use the draw event. Personally I've used draw event mostly for GUI related stuff so using it on shadows is a bit weird for me. Personally, I'd just have the main sprite create the shadow instance in the create event. Then the shadow's step event mimics everything the main sprite does. The shadow's create event would have it's depth in it at that point.

I'm super torn over which approach to plump for, haha.

While I had a free half hour this evening I made a very quick second video to demonstrate the problem I have if use a separate object for the player shadow.

1st video -- 2 objects, object_player and object_playershadow
--- object playershadow has step code:
--- x = obj_player.x
--- y = ((0.2*obj_player.x) + (obj_player.xstart / 5) + obj_player.ystart)-55

2nd video -- 1 object, object_player, drawing sprite_shadow in a Draw Event and sprite_player in a Draw End event.


If you compare the two, specifically when the player moves left and right at high speed, you should notice that in the first video the player shadow does not remain fixed directly beneath the player, it lags behind as the player.x value is delayed a step before being used by the shadow object. Whereas in the second video, with the player object drawing both, the shadow remains glued directly below it.

That's really the only reason I'm trying to avoid having the shadow as its own object -- I just think it looks kinda crappy when it lags behind the Witch. That said, having the shadow as an object would (should?) greatly simplify all the depth handling stuff I'll run into for shadows when I eventually add walls to the level that the player (and enemies) can fly over.

 

[Chainsawkitten]

If you compare the two, specifically when the player moves left and right at high speed, you should notice that in the first video the player shadow does not remain fixed directly beneath the player, it lags behind as the player.x value is delayed a step before being used by the shadow object. Whereas in the second video, with the player object drawing both, the shadow remains glued directly below it.

You can use End Step to update the shadow's position.

 

[Noaloha]

You can use End Step to update the shadow's position.

:O

 

[Wyndstryker]

:O

Yup. End Step is basically calculations/corrections done at the end of every step. Great for resyncing data and whatnot.

 

[Noaloha]

You can use End Step to update the shadow's position.

Yup. End Step is basically calculations/corrections done at the end of every step. Great for resyncing data and whatnot.

Excited to try this out but couldn't find the time last night and today'll be busy also. Sounds ideal though.

One thing I'm thinking about for the code is that I was previously assigning a shadow object to the player, which made it easy for one object to alter the other (since there's always only one object_player and one object_playershadow).

If I'm going to use objects for shadows wholesale, on all the enemies too, I need to figure out something that I assume is a fairly basic and standard code trick: having it so the first object_zombie only interacts with that first zombie's object_zombieshadow, and the second zombie only interacts with the second shadow, etc. Assigning specific instances to an 'owner' essentially. From the little I know so far I think I need to be playing around with some sort of 'id' designation in the code that applies to objects of which there'll be several separate pairs, such that when one object_zombie makes a call to its specific object_zombieshadow it doesn't apply to *all* instances of object_zombieshadow.

 

[Chainsawkitten]

Excited to try this out but couldn't find the time last night and today'll be busy also. Sounds ideal though.

One thing I'm thinking about for the code is that I was previously assigning a shadow object to the player, which made it easy for one object to alter the other (since there's always only one object_player and one object_playershadow).

If I'm going to use objects for shadows wholesale, on all the enemies too, I need to figure out something that I assume is a fairly basic and standard code trick: having it so the first object_zombie only interacts with that first zombie's object_zombieshadow, and the second zombie only interacts with the second shadow, etc. Assigning specific instances to an 'owner' essentially. From the little I know so far I think I need to be playing around with some sort of 'id' designation in the code that applies to objects of which there'll be several separate pairs.

myShadow = instance_create(x, y, obj_zombieshadow);
myShadow.zombie = id;

.

 

[Mephala]

I have spent a few hours per day hacking at the numerous tutorials. I haven't even looked at the source code for the games I bought yet. I feel like I've learnt so much but know close to nothing.

Havent even begun planning my own project yet. Looking pretty grim. Maybe just a point and click adventure for now.

 

[Cptkrush]

I have had no time to work on anything since last week, so it looks like I've fallen behind a bit. I also need to start from scratch on something more fun, the clicker idea was cool in theory, but the amount of work it will take to implement the interesting aspects is just too much for me right now. Been watching tons of Horror movies this month so far, so I might have a few ideas kicking around up in my noggin.

 

[Whitebison]

Still working on the walk cycle of the main character...

Here's the first scenario of my horror adventure

 

[Kalentan]

Still working on the walk cycle of the main character...

Here's the first scenario of my horror adventure

Wow!!! Amazing!

 

[Armadilo]

guys what do you guys think about this gamemaker Tutorial book ? http://www.amazon.com/dp/1517313007/?tag=neogaf0e-20

The author seems to of wrote allot about gamemaker in the past and I think this just came out, its $50 on amazon but at the authors website it's 25 for the Ebook version.

That or Heartbeast book thats mainly GM language it seems, but on sale for 12

 

[RelentlessRolento]

guys what do you guys think about this gamemaker Tutorial book ? http://www.amazon.com/dp/1517313007/?tag=neogaf0e-20

The author seems to of wrote allot about gamemaker in the past and I think this just came out, its $50 on amazon but at the authors website it's 25 for the Ebook version.

That or Heartbeast book thats mainly GM language it seems, but on sale for 12

This one might be better, or this one


I have this one myself and can say Ive learned a few things that have helped a ton from it but can't say it'll be super good for others.


I have an app I've developed that would still fall under the umbrella for this competition that I've been building for the past month in gamemaker... don't know if it's submitable though (I'll reread the OP)

 

[HP_Wuvcraft]

Shit. I missed this deal.

 

[Cptkrush]

guys what do you guys think about this gamemaker Tutorial book ? http://www.amazon.com/dp/1517313007/?tag=neogaf0e-20

The author seems to of wrote allot about gamemaker in the past and I think this just came out, its $50 on amazon but at the authors website it's 25 for the Ebook version.

That or Heartbeast book thats mainly GM language it seems, but on sale for 12

Heartbeasts book is alright. For 12 bucks it's a steal, but I wouldn't pay the full price for it, it's pretty short and feels kind of rushed on larger subjects such as data structures.

 

[Noaloha]

I'm messing around with sounds this morning and wanting to get my 'flight' audio worked out. Specifically, I'm trying to replicate how the flight audio works as heard here.

As the ship in Zaxxon gains and loses altitude, the pitch of the flight audio rises and falls. Player information / feedback-wise, this is super important and is something I absolutely want in my own game.

I've grabbed a bfxr sample and placed the following code in my obj_player's Create Event

Flying = audio_play_sound(sou_fly1,1,true)

And in the Step Event

FlyPitch = Altitude / 15
audio_sound_pitch(Flying, FlyPitch)

(since Altitude ranges from 0-75, this reduces that down to a 0-5 range)

However it's not working as I'd expected, which may simply be because I'm no musician / audio engineer and maybe my understanding of 'pitch' is screwy.

In addition to making the audio sound 'higher' or 'lower', the change in audio_sound_pitch() also seems to be adjusting the frequency of the audio loop, faster and slower, such that low Altitudes sound like a slow Giant's footsteps (kuuusssh... kuuusssh... kuuusssh...), where high Altitudes sound like a tinny helicopter (ktch!-ktch!-ktch!-ktch!-ktch!-ktch!-ktch!-).

Is that proper behaviour for audio_sound-pitch()? Any thoughts, code-wise, on how to achieve the pitch shift I'm after, or is my code okay, in theory at least?


The second issue I'm having, though this is perhaps one I simply need to spend some time fiddling with, is making a 'flat' sound in bfxr such that it loops cleanly. Every single sample I've made has some 'curve' to it, making the loop super obvious. Are there any tricks to making a completely uniform 'crunchy' sample in bfxr, similar to the flight sound in that Zaxxon video posted above.


EDIT : made a couple of improvements,

First I adjusted the Step code to

FlyPitch = 0.3 + (Altitude / 200)
audio_sound_pitch(Flying, FlyPitch)

Giving a *much* lower range for FlyPitch, which has certainly helped a little. The distance between the min and max Altitude points feels roughly where it needs to be now.

To try and get a 'flat' bfxr sample, I took the flattest sounding .wav I had, and pushed it into Audacity (which I'm mostly unfamiliar with). I found the most uniform looking part of the waveform and just cropped the sample down to something like a tenth of a second, saved and put it into GM.

It actually got rid of the frequency issue for the most part (or made it much less apparent), but the few attempts I've made all, without fail, now sound like motorbikes. Excellent motorbike sounds! But sadly not what I'm after. So yeah, still trying to figure out how to make that nice flat, crunchy, static-ey audio loop.


EDIT2: ha, the more I fiddle with this, the more I suspect it's not an "ask the forum experts for help" thing, but that it's just a science of sound problem and that I need to take the time to figure out the correct sample. I'm pretty sure my code is fine and everything's working as it should, I'm just using poorly chosen audio.

 

[Noaloha]

Got my audio thingy figured out, at least to an acceptable level.

Afterwards, I spent some time with a site called PulseBoy and had a shot at writing some menu music. That's not something I ever did try before! Quite fun. The resulting tune is obnoxiously irritating and anxiety-inducing, but whatevs. It has character.

This evening I spent a couple of hours working on sprites for my Witch player object. At some point tomorrow I guess I need to figure out how to assign these within the code to the directional keys (and diagonal combinations), plus hitting the 'shoot' button.

We have a neutral sprite in the centre (no WASD keys held), then 8 others corresponding to the 8-way directional movement, plus each has a sprite for firing. Leaning left and right. Broomstick up and down.

 

[Noaloha]

This looks fine, right? Nothing wrong here, yes? I definitely did my image-scaling math correctly, for sure for sure. Mm-hm. *Nod.*

 

[Skittles]

This looks fine, right? Nothing wrong here, yes? I definitely did my image-scaling math correctly, for sure for sure. Mm-hm. *Nod.*

She's just been drinking her milk

 

[Hugstable]

Awww darn never saw this thread til today, I would have loved to try making a game for cheap haha -_-

 

[Wyndstryker]

Awww darn never saw this thread til today, I would have loved to try making a game for cheap haha -_-

You still have time if you can get yourself a copy of gamemaker.

 

[Mephala]

Awww darn never saw this thread til today, I would have loved to try making a game for cheap haha -_-

You missed the Humble Bundle but you can still get the free version of GameMaker.

 

[Noaloha]

Quick video showing MyFirstGame™ progress so far. (I need to tweak my video capture settings - apologies for the occasional blurriness.)

Main things added/improved this weekend:

• obnoxious flashing menu
• anxiety-inducing menu music (sorry)
• pitch-shifting 'altitude' sound effect
• redrew Witch, Zombie, Imp sprites and animations
• icons on GUI for player lives (9x cat, 1x witch) and frog pick-ups
• fuel meter (as Zaxxon-ey as I could manage) with refills from trashcan 'dust'

 

[StarVigil]

Gonna skip this round after all, since I'm trying to redesign my other game. Good luck to all!

 

[SenorArdilla]

Still working on the walk cycle of the main character...

Here's the first scenario of my horror adventure

I see this and immediately get depressed.

 

[RelentlessRolento]

Planned to have this made this month but I feel it still falls under Halloween theme. Made in GameMaker and using vector assets (illustrator files converted to flash vectors which gamemaker accepts).

It's named _ Howler _ n is on iOS:



http://apple.co/1Pus6hf

It's also available on Win/Mac via itch.io:

http://wolfofvictoria.itch.io/-howler-

 

[Noaloha]

Been hard to find time to work on this recently, but I had a couple hours this morning and finally started working on the 'Zaxxon walls' that I'm aiming to shoehorn into my Hallowe'en street setting. I'm a little fearful of getting stuck into the code as there's a bunch of isometry illusions that need implementing (plus a couple more that I'd additionally like to implement), but I figured the least I should do is get the sprites made for the object itself.

The in-game contrivance is that zombies/demons are running amok in this town and that, as you progress down the road, you start to encounter sandbags and cowering residents and the background will get more and more 'warzone'-ey / busted up. It turns out that sandbags are way harder to draw than simple bricks in this dumb isometric projection I'm using! (I based my initial background and resulting code on a Google screenshot of Zaxxon. Then later realised that the screenshot was obviously skewed from 4:3 to 16:9. Too late! I'd written all my y=mx+c code based on a 1/5 gradient on the NW axis and a 1/2 gradient on the NE. Oops.)

Still, as tricky as the sandbags were to draw, it turned out okay I think, with a first attempt at the bottom that I wasn't at all happy with (looks like gold bullion or something), and a much nicer sandbag-wall sprite at the top. And the 'single unit' sprite happily maps and overlaps with itself to create the wider/taller structures.

 

[Dead Prince]

a week left. hope everyone's making good progress.

 

[Noaloha]

Dunno if I'd say I'm making good progress, but certainly some progress. The last week (and week to come) are kinda crazy with Adult Responsibilities and other distractions to GameMakering; just started a new job last Monday, the 3yr old came down with Chicken Pox a few days ago, and I got home yesterday to find that we now own a Wii U! All that said, and with just a week to go, I think I have to start wrapping things up and tying a bow on the thing, just to ensure that there's some sort of 'complete' game come the deadline.

I'm going to have skip a couple of game mechanics and interactions that I'd hoped to include (example: the Witch can turn certain enemies into frogs, and the frogs are counted on the HUD, but the frogs do not actually *do* anything yet and I doubt I'll be able to implement their use in time). Also, I haven't done any work on any kind of end-of-level(-game) Boss yet. Don't be surprised if the boss ends up being just an MSPaint blob that dies after one bullet.

I'm looking forward to straightening the existing things out though and then arranging them in an actual level. I haven't messed around at all with the process of actually turning the GM project into an executable. I hope it's as simple as 'press this button.'

One important thing I did manage to fix over the last week (which in tunr resulted in me needing to rewrite a *ton* of existing code) was how I've been handling depth for all object sprites and also how to check for 'wall'-collisions. Without going into too much of a deep dive in specifics, I was bashing my head against a wall using y-values for depth that were adjusted based on an 'Altitude' variable (distance between object and shadow). Nope! No good for isometric. I had a complete apple falling on my head moment when away from the computer and suddenly realised how to make depth work correctly. This picture probably explains it better than I could in words:

Hopefully I'll have time later to make a quick video capture of where the game is at currently and share it.

 

[Noaloha]

Not long left!

Realistically, I think I only have half a day available between now and the deadline to dedicate to this, which is a daaamn shame. So many parts that I couldn't / won't get to add in time.

The player can pick up frogs! (Buuut, aside from a GUI icon, they do nothing whatsoever.)


Here's a quick video showing where this Baby's First GameMaker Game game is at currently.

 

[DavionStriker]

Still working on the walk cycle of the main character...

Here's the first scenario of my horror adventure

Fuck you Whitebison,

Spoiler

I could never do this. You are an incredibly talented dude. Amazing work.

 

[Noaloha]

I think... maybe.. I might actually have something to submit in an hour or two. It'll be an unpolished heap of hastily taped-together code, but I'm hoping it at least will be a 'complete' unfinished thing.

 

[Noaloha]

Soooooo... kinda quiet in here, huh!

Well, I'll take a shot at sharing what I ended up with. Literally created the .exe ten minutes ago (literally added code to the game fifteen minutes ago, ha).

I need to turn off this PC and actually have a Hallowe'en with my GF, so I'm not going to write up anything lengthy about the process here and now.

Here you go, My First Video Game!

HEXXON.EXE (.zip file held on dropboxdotcom)

And a quick screenshot,

Feedback and criticisms are completely welcome. I certainly have enough problems with the game as it is myself. Lots of "just do it this way" or "well, I'll have to skip that idea" simply to make the deadline in time.

Oh!! One thing. I'm not 100% convinced the game is completely compatible with different screen resolutions. It's been made entirely on a 1080p monitor and, while I've increasingly endeavoured to code with screen compatibility in mind (as I've learnt how to make a game), I have a feeling that there's still code in there using absolute Xs and Ys instead of scaleable screen positions.

tl;dr on the above paragraph: if you use anything other than a 1080p monitor, please do let me know if the game looks batshit terrible or plain old broken at any point.​

Hope you get a chance to try it out and enjoy it. Maybe even share some high scores.

Good luck to the rest of the entrants!

 

[Dead Prince]

Hm. I think we didn't have that many entering.

 

[ASIS]

Man talk about disappointing, The entries so far look very good but there aren't many, not at all!!!

 

[Noaloha]

Just want to say thanks to you Dead Prince for making this thread, even if the GameJam didn't really seem to take to its soil. I was interested in the initial Humble Bundle deal but reticent enough about my lack of experience to avoid making the purchase. It was your Hallowe'en thing here that gave me the push to go for it, specifically the appealing prospect of learning how to make a game alongside a group of both similarly inexperienced users and users with the know-how to give advice.

Even though the whole GameJam benefit of creating/sharing along with a group didn't pan out, I still found the whole process enjoyable, interesting and rewarding on a purely individual level (and frustrating, difficult and exhausting also, but I'm sure that just goes with the territory!). Glad I did it, so again Dead Prince, thanks!

 

[Dead Prince]

Just want to say thanks to you Dead Prince for making this thread, even if the GameJam didn't really seem to take to its soil. I was interested in the initial Humble Bundle deal but reticent enough about my lack of experience to avoid making the purchase. It was your Hallowe'en thing here that gave me the push to go for it, specifically the appealing prospect of learning how to make a game alongside a group of both similarly inexperienced users and users with the know-how to give advice.

Even though the whole GameJam benefit of creating/sharing along with a group didn't pan out, I still found the whole process enjoyable, interesting and rewarding on a purely individual level (and frustrating, difficult and exhausting also, but I'm sure that just goes with the territory!). Glad I did it, so again Dead Prince, thanks!

Ha
Glad to see you stuck through it. I think it would have been better to make a game maker thread if there weren't one.

 

[Wyndstryker]

No clue if there is a gamemaker community thread...

Would be interesting to check.

 

[SixMachine]

Soooooo... kinda quiet in here, huh!

Well, I'll take a shot at sharing what I ended up with. Literally created the .exe ten minutes ago (literally added code to the game fifteen minutes ago, ha).

I need to turn off this PC and actually have a Hallowe'en with my GF, so I'm not going to write up anything lengthy about the process here and now.

Here you go, My First Video Game!

HEXXON.EXE (.zip file held on dropboxdotcom)

And a quick screenshot,



Feedback and criticisms are completely welcome. I certainly have enough problems with the game as it is myself. Lots of "just do it this way" or "well, I'll have to skip that idea" simply to make the deadline in time.

Oh!! One thing. I'm not 100% convinced the game is completely compatible with different screen resolutions. It's been made entirely on a 1080p monitor and, while I've increasingly endeavoured to code with screen compatibility in mind (as I've learnt how to make a game), I have a feeling that there's still code in there using absolute Xs and Ys instead of scaleable screen positions.

tl;dr on the above paragraph: if you use anything other than a 1080p monitor, please do let me know if the game looks batshit terrible or plain old broken at any point.​

Hope you get a chance to try it out and enjoy it. Maybe even share some high scores.

Good luck to the rest of the entrants!

Gonna give this a download. It's cool that you have something done.

In the last half of the month I only got to work on my game sparingly. It was a nice experience though, nothing close to done, but more of just something to experiment with ideas, such as changing the direction of bullets and making trick shots in a top down shooter. It doesn't really look much like Halloween either, I generally just drew the crappiest sprite as a placeholder to try something. One thing that I didn't get working right was laser beams. I could create something like a bunch of laser line sprites to create the illusion, but it can be easy to break the illusion of that if I move my aiming reticle too fast. Think of it like the laser gun in Contra 3, though I noticed in that game, you had weird things like midway the laser wouldn't be straight.

 

[Dead Prince]

No clue if there is a gamemaker community thread...

Would be interesting to check.

I googled. the last thread was from 2010. Lol

 

[RelentlessRolento]

I googled. the last thread was from 2010. Lol

This thread helps and has many GameMaker users:

http://m.neogaf.com/showthread.php?t=965454

 

[Noaloha]

To conclude the couple of 'progress so far' videos I put up during the month on Youtube, I made a last one showing the full game.

Similar to the one I put up a week before the deadline, but I added sparkles to the Witch's flight, a Tips section on the main menu and I added a boss I did something at the end of the level which can prompt a Win condition. Also, the hit detection is much less forgiving in this final version compared to earlier. I tightened the code up on that quite a lot on the last day, (perhaps too much for such a light game, though I think it felt more rewarding ultimately). Oh, and finally, I put much more emphasis on the 'score attack' nature of the game, in the hopes that therein lay its replayability.

Anyway, give it a watch if you care to.

====

Oh, and I meant to add. I'd actually really love a dedicated Gamemaker thread (similar I guess to the RPGMaker thread). I do follow the Indie Game Dev thread and read it with great interest, but (and this is perhaps entirely on me) I kind of find the thread intimidating (maybe the wrong word) to post in, what with the wealth of super talented folk there talking in main about indie game development as a source of income, as opposed to mild and puddlefooted beginner hobbying.

 

[kd-z]

Congrats to everyone who got their game done. I didn't, cause I started way too late (I'm lazy and lame), and soon dropped the Halloween theme, so my thing is very, very early.

But I'm super glad I finally gave GameMaker a chance, it's quite awesome

Also, Noaloha, congrats on getting retweeted by Tom Francis
https://twitter.com/Pentadact/status/661604877223780352

 

[mnz]

.

Since it's so quiet here...I just wanted to say that I did play Hexxon and I'm really really impressed since this apparently your first game. And then you make an isometric scroller in Game Maker?! How is that fair?

Anyway, I really like how it looks, the Iso-look is quite unique and I'm wondering now if there shouldn't be more games using it. Also, the game is hard as fuck, I don't know if you want it that way, but man, I needed about 5 tries to get through that first door alone, let alone shoot anything. I'll try to set a better score before I make any further judgements!

 

[Noaloha]

Also, Noaloha, congrats on getting retweeted by Tom Francis
https://twitter.com/Pentadact/status/661604877223780352

Cheers, that made me quite, quite giddy that he replied. His tutorial was genuinely what prompted me to bite the bullet on the Humble deal and I really don't know if I'd have kept up with the project without it. Just a very watchable, educational little series that kept me engaged and motivated to do my own learning on the side, and apply stuff to in principle rather than rote copy. Tom's obviously got teaching chops alongside his game design chops.

Since it's so quiet here...I just wanted to say that I did play Hexxon and I'm really really impressed since this apparently your first game. And then you make an isometric scroller in Game Maker?! How is that fair?

Anyway, I really like how it looks, the Iso-look is quite unique and I'm wondering now if there shouldn't be more games using it. Also, the game is hard as fuck, I don't know if you want it that way, but man, I needed about 5 tries to get through that first door alone, let alone shoot anything. I'll try to set a better score before I make any further judgements!

Thank you! I do think the iso thing (especially coupled with the additional 'altitude' aspect) might have been a bit too much to chew on for a first bite, but a bit of stubbornness (and some lucky Eureka moments) kept me going.

A quick word on the game being difficult, and the iso-shooter look you mention. I have a theory on that. If you go back to the game that Hexxon is a bit of a love letter to, Zaxxon, you might find that - as much as Zaxxon is considered a classic - it's... kind of bad. Or, it feels bad? It's hard to play. It's not intuitive. I put that down rather wholly to its isometric shooting. I suspect there's something 'a stage too far' about its shooting when it comes to processing the information on screen. You have to actually take the two components of 'shadow position' and 'shadow distance compared to enemy shadow distance' and match them together. The pseudo 3D doesn't really lend itself to just eyeballing your shots, and firing on a gut instinct. It takes practice, basically. Practice to sort of unlearn your gut habit. The 3D illusion that it makes doesn't support the kind of shooting we've picked up through the years.

Hexxon is, I'd argue, similarly bad, or unintuitive. But, and this opinion comes from the 'love letter to Zaxxon' part, I do enjoy Zaxxon's shooting, for all its abrasiveness. It's interesting, in my opinion at least, it's something slightly different to the immediacy and visual fluency of a non-iso shooter. Relying on shadow cues for your aiming (or the player shooting bullets to check the path ahead is clear) was something I found fascinating as a kid. The thing I liked most about making/playing Hexxon was it allowed me to tug on a few of those strings again. But I do think the general isometric shooting thing is flawed, outside of its unique quirk. I think nowadays a game like this needs something like a laser sight for your weapon. But that wouldn't be Zaxxon.

Long-winded thought dump aside, general tip is to really focus on the idea of a line from the centre of your shadow running up the road, parallel with it. All your movement and shooting should aim (ha) to take that 'road-axis' line into account.

 

[Dead Prince]

So my computer needs to be reformatted or hdd replaced. Stupid power outage messed up my pc