Author Archives: Matt Roszak

BH2: Works on Mobile

Hey guys, I wanted to see if a mobile port of Bullet Heaven 2 was feasible, so I spent some time today fiddling with the game.In just 3 hours I got the game to a playable state on my Galaxy Note 8. It works great with a stylus, and even detects my Xbox controller. The framerate is pretty high with the graphics settings turned down, even on Heavenly difficulty.

That’s the fun stuff done, the other 99% would be just polishing off the rough edges. The controls would need to be simplified for touch controls, the memory management would need to be improved to stop the occasional garbage-collector stutters, and I would have to consider adding a vertical aspect ratio as that may make more sense on mobile. Overall, it looks like less work than porting the EBF games.

Anyway, that’s not gonna happen until I finish the EBF5 port and the EBF Collection.

Also, don’t let anyone tell you Flash doesn’t run on mobile. Flash with Starling has incredibly fast performance!

Bullet Heaven 2 is now DRM free! And maybe works on Mac and Linux

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Hey guys, I’ve updated Bullet Heaven 2 to be DRM-free on Steam, and I’ve also published the game on Itch.io.

On Steam you can opt-into this new version by going to the game properties in the Steam client and selecting the betas tab. It should say version 1.2.0 when you start it up, and the only difference is that it can now run without Steam. I’ll make this version live for everyone once I confirm that it works.

On Itch.io there’s a 2nd version of the game, never before released, that runs as a normal .swf Flash file, rather than a Windows executable. In theory this version should run on any operating system, but results may vary. Shoot me a private message on Twitter or via email, if you are a Linux or Mac user and want to test it out.

Snowland

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Here’s another biome from my probably-never-to-be-finished NES game, running on an emulator.
It does indeed look a bit like Adventure Story.

In other news, I went back to Doom 2016 and beat it on Nightmare difficulty. When I first played it, Hurt Me Plenty was quite challenging, so I’ve made a lot of progress. I used to totally suck at FPS games, but these new Dooms and Doom-likes are pretty fun.

Also, big shout out to DUSK and HROT – two great indie games that play a lot like Doom.
Lots of fun.

Mysterious NES Game

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Hey guys, a few months ago I started messing around in NES Maker, which, as you may have guessed, is a game engine for making NES games. I didn’t get much done on the programming side, and mostly stuck to the platformer game template, but I’m pretty happy with the graphics I made. Here’s my very first NES tileset and level – this is a screenshot of the game running in an emulator.

I’m not actively working on this at the moment – but maybe I’ll get back to it someday.

EBF5 Mobile Pricing Info

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Hey guys, people keep asking about how much EBF5 will cost on mobile, so I figure I’d let you know what the plan is at the moment. (although all of this may still change…)

It’s going to be a free app with in-app purchases for the DLC dungeons, Newgame+, Custom Games, and Cheats/Challenges.

The free mobile version is going to be very similar to the free web version, so it will include the full story content, but it will have the balancing of the latest Steam version, and the new Monster Cards will also be available. There’s gonna be ads after every battle or two – I hear the thing you gotta do nowadays is give the player some incentive to watch the ads, so I may need to tie some extra gold or something to that.

As for the in-app purchases, it’s probably going to be $15-$20 for the full package, with the option to buy the features separately, for example, $5.99 to remove ads, $5.99 for the DLC dungeons, $5.99 for Custom Game modes, etc. So it could potentially be cheaper if you’re not interested in everything.

Anyway, I’m working on the Android version first, with iOS coming a bit later. The game will work best on a large phone with a stylus, but I’m making the interface bigger to make it more user-friendly for smaller phones and fat fingers. There’s not that much work left to do, but I’ve also not been working much lately, so who knows how long it will take. I did say I would have a beta for Patreons soon, so I should at least try to get that done… but I shouldn’t make any promises. I’m sorry for the delays though.