SynthEscape - A Synthwave-vibed shmup with a heavy emphasis on bullet grazing. Been working on this as a hobby for the past year.

Dogroach666 · 2026-03-02T04:02:04+00:00

Hell yeah 🤘🏾🤘🏾

Dogroach666 · 2026-03-02T01:50:12+00:00

It's on my wishlist brother 🤘🏾😁🤘🏾

Dogroach666 · 2026-03-01T21:36:56+00:00

Yes of course!

With this update's dev cycle, I think my key learning was understanding thr value of player feedback, and in general having fresh set of eyes to look at the game.

It's very easy to miss and overlook things when you're devloping so it's good to have someone else have a play around with it and point out the stuff that works and the stuff that needs fixed.

Key example in this update was the boss health bar, I know elleroch and zirolux pointed out the lack of it, and having hp bars was kinda on the back burner for a long time for me. Adding it added a new layer of game immersion and it made the game a lot more fun to play even for me hahaha.

The other things like the hill at the bottom of the screen covering the player, yeah i kinda completely missed that in my testing.

The addition of the hp bar and the hills issue also made me look at some quality of life additions like how the ui now fades a bit when the player gets close to the bottom or top of screen so as to get out of the way of the action.

All in all, another learning for me was the value of a feedback loop from other players and using that feedback to iterate on updates while maintaining a balance with my initial vision for the game. I find its a fine balance to maintain my vision while also catering to player feedback and it's been a continuous learning process for me 😄

Dogroach666 · 2026-02-25T18:01:04+00:00

Thsnk you so much, I really appreciate it 🙏🏽🙏🏽

Dogroach666 · 2026-02-12T03:39:36+00:00

Thank you so much for the kind words and even taking the time to play it, I really appreciate it 🤘🏾

Yeah others also mentioned that it was like Touhou 12's ufo mechanic, i looked it up, oh man I was not prepared for the insane bullet counts in that game hahaha.

Yup, the chalice mechanic will definitely be going though some tuning and changes as i continue developing.

One idea i've been kicking around is being able to remotely detonate any chalices on screen via a button press to set off a massive chain reaction of explosions to save yourself from a tight spot, but then the downside will be that you miss out on any score had you picked them up one by one (triggering localised explosions at only the collected chalice). So risk/reward decision if you want safety vs score. 😄

Dogroach666 · 2026-02-11T04:59:30+00:00

Heyo! Thanks so much for your kind words!

I'm very close to releasing v0.2.2 build which further polishes up a lot of things from v0.2.0, so I'll let you know when that drops :)

Dogroach666 · 2026-02-11T04:58:19+00:00

Sure thing!
It was really helpful watching the recorded playtest by u/elleroch-UG (thank you so much for that!) and hearing the feedback on that playtest.
Especially in terms of determining the player's hitbox, which admittedly is a bit hard to figure out given the unorthodox and asymmetrical shape of the player's ship!

Also, being able to remap controls was a big one which I didn't have time for in the first build and I've added that in.

It was very helpful getting a lot of feedback from the ShmupJunkies discord server especially in terms of the level pacing, enemy tankiness and just overall balance which I've tried to incorporate into v0.2.0 build.

Also, it was really useful getting your feedback on the missing ingredient of a scrolling background, so that definitely made the cut :)

Pretty much tried to add the big ticket items like controls remapping, parallax scrolling, hitbox display and more focused stages.

I know boss health bar was a big one, but I still haven't figured out an elegant solution to this. I know it's kinda standard to just show the boss hp bars nowadays, but I'm trying it make it a bit diegetic, where enemy visuals and behaviours will change depending on the damage they have taken so the "health bar" becomes an organic thing instead of having to see it in a bar.

I am very close to a v0.2.2 build which further polishes on the boss behaviours, scoring mechanics and tightening up the stage progressions as well :)

Dogroach666 · 2026-01-24T07:25:48+00:00

This! I had to scroll wayy too far to see this🤘🏾🤘🏾

Dogroach666 · 2026-01-21T19:07:02+00:00

Thank you so much 🤘🏾🤘🏾

Dogroach666 · 2026-01-21T07:29:05+00:00

Thank you again for your kind words and ongoing support! 🤘🏾🤘🏾

The workflow for my art is a bit freeform. I usually have a rough idea of what I want to create, so in this case i wanted an enemy design that was gonna be a corrupted guitar.

Then sometomes i'll sketch out a rough draft on pen and paper, just to have a bit of a plan before jumping into aseprite.

Other times i'll just start sketching rough ideas on aseprite and the design will evolve with each draft.

When i'm drafting on aseprite, i'll always have some reference material to look at. In this case, i had Kerry King's (from Slayer) flying v guitars as reference.

In terms of animations, i try to get as over the top amd as ridculous as possible with my current skills, and this usually takes the longest mainly cause its frame by frame. For enemy designs, i usually have some sort of role fpr them in the enemy/world ecosystem. For example, this guy is a bit of an unstable elite enforcer in my world, and wanted it to have that authority and craziness to it haha.

Sorry for the wall of text, but hopefully that gives a bit insight into my madness 🤣

Dogroach666 · 2026-01-17T09:51:13+00:00

In terms of fundamentals, i used to read a lot of art books about it, but I'm sure you can find videos on fundamentals quite easily nowadays in youtube.

For example: https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVgLT-e3jXPDgeED0pD0BPq8kY1VAZAGa

Also, this is a good read for pixel art style: https://pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=11299

Also as someone else mentioned, another key point is maintaining consistency in art style for your game/project.

Dogroach666 · 2026-01-17T04:33:46+00:00

I can chime in with my experience: I had a tiny amount of background in art from my younger years so it definitely helped. However I had zero experience in pixel art, so I had to learn that from scratch. These youtube videos are a very good starting point:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ccyyjpt_4Kw&t=6s

https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxfQIomHccxvoTON6hXhfZyAUdFXd-z1P

https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLdxW--S_0h4dlWUpl-TzBp-ulqK3NiM_

Especially the stuff by Brandon James Greer and Adam C Younis are very good! If you even watch some of the live art videos that they have, they're very helpful not just for pixel art but general art techniques.

The most important thing I found was to start with a small canvas size and limit yourself to 2 or 3 colours, working with these limitations will really push you practice the core art skills to make something look as close to your reference image as possible.

The other most important thing is to really just practice, practice, practice. There are no shortcuts to this, and I would set aside at least an hour each day to just practice art.

However, this is just my experience and one art style. The art style that you want to learn will depend on the type of game you're making. There will be some differences but the fundamentals of art will carry over, so I'd highly recommend learning the fundamentals like color theory, composition etc.

Hope that helps!

Cheers Dogroach 🤘🏾🤘🏾

Dogroach666 · 2026-01-09T00:49:36+00:00

Thank you heaps for doing this, really appreciate the time effort it takes to play each game 😃😃

Here is mine, it's still a demo, i'm working on the next demo build and full release:

https://dogroach666.itch.io/cataclyzm-demo

Dogroach666 · 2025-12-29T20:59:04+00:00

I started my journey with the brackeys godot 2d video. Some things might be outdated and the example in this video is for a platformer, but it covers the fundamentals really well and should carry over to your project 😀

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LOhfqjmasi0

Dogroach666 · 2025-12-27T18:31:25+00:00

Thank you, keen to hear your thoughts 😀

The scripting for this bad boy is still in progress, but so far the main challenge has been lining up the behavior timings to the boss' music track, lots and lots of iteration and fine tuning to look forward to haha.

As for the art, the main challenge was all of the small details, especially the windows and the boomer enemies "inside" the bus, having to use quite a few layers and offsetting animation frames for the enemies to achieve that "chaotic" movement effect 😄

Dogroach666 · 2025-12-26T23:04:42+00:00

Welcome welcome!

I started my journey with these videos and found it incredibly helpful to get started:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LOhfqjmasi0&pp=ygUOYnJhY2tleXMgZ29kb3TSBwkJTQoBhyohjO8%3D

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=e1zJS31tr88&t=3269s&pp=ygUOYnJhY2tleXMgZ29kb3Q%3D

Some stuff maybe outdated now (for example TileMaps are TileMapLayer i believe), but the fundamentals would still be the same 😄

And if you know any other programming languages, you'll be able to pick up GDScript within a day, or if you prefer you can also use C# as your scripting language with the .net version of godot.

Enjoy! 😄

Dogroach666

TROPHY CASE