Thank you all!
The only thing we had to compromise on is our hours as we're only a two man programming team without artists. So game features and artwork were compromised, which will see the light of day in sequels, but it had nothing to do with XNA. We are still happy with our results because of our extended work. How many other Community Games have spent 8+ months in development?
The Raiden series were an inspiration, but so were a lot of other 2D shooters. We have played and beat nearly ever shooter that has come our way. The best description of our inspiration is that it came from the best elements in a lot of shooters. Not only in what works, but also in what doesn't work. I wiill not be surprised, and I have already seen it happen slightly, that gamers will think we are missing a feature because we did not have time to put it in (or were too "stupid" to know) when actually the feature is missing because of choice. Shields, bombs, and ship-combining are all examples. You can see we never explicitly copied off another game. We chose what works, and skipped what does not. However cool ship-combining is, for example, is it what an expert player wants? No. Find me a 2D shooter gameplay recording of an expert that uses ship-combining. What expert players want is effective weapons and effective weapon controls (our spread/laser weapon) and the true elites want to control two ships at once to dominate the game with double the firepower (dual play). So we ended up with two innovative features, in a genre that is practically impossible to innovate in, that are what players actually want in the midst of gameplay, not just gimmicks that will never be used.
I will admit that Raiden II, or maybe Raiden DX which I have yet to play, is probably the best overall 2D shooter, ever. But it's interesting to note that our team has always wanted to do a horizontal shooter, not a vertical one like Raiden and Duality ZF, so our true inspiration lies with the horizontal sub-genre of the shmup genre. Thunder Force series comes to mind as a great inspiration. But, the widescreen format allowed more room for eight fighters, plus vertical shooters are easier for a first game, so the choice to go vertical was already made for us.
Back to the original point, compromising for XNA is often nothing more than an excuse. I say "often" because there are some things some developers have had to comprosmise on. I know of at least one game that had to drop its framerate, instead of dropping features, once the game was ported to the Xbox.
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I thought you all would get a kick out of our new ad spot on XNA Roundup, we are mentioned four times in it (the last being the trailer spot at the end):
XNA Roundup #16 Tank Strike, A Great Easter Egg Hunt
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9Bd0qWSjac
M Doucette / Xona Games
Duality ZF (
Dream Build Play Top 20)
