Dance of Bullets

A little backstory

Dance of Bullets is a bullet hell shmup I worked on mostly in 2012 using the XNA framework, mostly driven by the fact that there weren't many games in this genre on the PC outside japan at the time. (And / or they were hard to access.) This isn't an issue anymore as Steam became more open to submissions, so I slowly stopped developing DoB, especially as support for XNA has been ended by Microsoft.

What's the point of adding it to GitHub, then?

Looking at the current selection of bullet hell games, while there's definitely a plenty of them, there's one aspect of DoB that feels unique to me: its flexible, highly extensible and easy-to-create format for levels, enemies and bosses, that could make it possible for everyone to create their own bullet hell shmup without programming knowledge of any kind.

Ideally, the goal is to release it as a free game on Steam, with workshop support for levels. Realistically, I want to clean up the code and assets a bit, make adding custom content even more flexible, and releasing it on Itch.

The current state

❌	The bad news
❌	There's no menu or settings. The game just starts when you run it, and you can't restart when you die (or reach the end of the last stage). There's a config file, but it only supports setting a resolution. Fixed keybindings with no controller support.
❌	Only has placeholder assets (especially on the second and third level of the alpha), barebones HUD.
❌	While objects can move across the screen in fascinating ways, there's no support for animated textures yet.
❌	No sounds or music.

✔️	The good news
✔️	Supports levels, bosses, even mid-level bosses, and "scriptable" enemy movement.
✔️	Complex and highly customizable (composable, even) bullet patterns.
✔️	Special abilities: slow-down time and "rain of bullets".
✔️	A sophisticated, XAML-based level format with a huge focus on flexibility, reusability and extensibility. After reading the documentation (coming soon...) it should be easy to create new enemies, bosses and complete levels (even campaigns) without programming knowledge / modifying the code.
✔️	NEW in Bullet Bash Edition: Self-adjusting difficulty – the longer you fly without getting hit, the quicker the game becomes. In turn, getting hit reduces the speed, allowing you to catch your breath.
✔️	NEW in Bullet Bash Edition: Scoring! Shooting down enemies will now award you with delicious points depending on their toughness and the current difficulty level.

💄	Code quality
💄	As the codebase evolved, I noticed that some of my internal concepts (like Component and Behavior) have many similarities, offering many refactoring opportunities!
💄	Some of the built-in behaviors became quite redundant as the core system got more flexible. Probably I could delete some code.
💄	Although MonoGame opens the possibility to make the game work on non-Windows systems, I use Windows specific APIs for reading XAML. Porting to macOS and Linux should be possible, but challenging.
💄	No documentation, although it would be very important, especially for prospect level creators. This is one of the first things on my TODO list.

Playing the game

Download the current alpha and take it for a spin from Itch! You can find how-to-play instructions there.

Making your own levels

While I've yet to make a proper documentation for the level format of Dance of Bullets, open the files in the StageData folder with your favorite text editor and start tweaking! You will be able to add your own levels, enemies, bullet patterns and bosses in no time!

Some pointers until I write some proper documentation:

• Stages.xaml is the main file the game loads. It contains Stages (essentially, the levels) which will be loaded in the order they are in the file. A stage consists of multiple Segments, each with its own boss(es). Segments contain EnemySpawners, which orchestrate the timing of the appearance of the various enemies on the level / segment.
• Prototypes-1.xaml, Prototypes-2.xaml​ and PrototypesRC-1.xaml​ contain Enemy definitions, referenced by the EnemySpawners in Stages.xaml. It governs how they move, what they look like, how though they are etc. Their shooting patterns are, however, a bit more complicated, so those usually appear in the last file, called...
• Prototypes-Common.xaml: it contains various constants (e.g. colors), behaviors (which in this case are mostly bullet pattern definitions referenced by the enemies) and bullet definitions for the bullet patterns. (Essentially, a bullet definition specifies how a bullet moves once it's been shot, while a *TurretBehavior defines how and when exactly should the shooting happen.)

Here's an example pattern definition

<b:TurningTurretBehavior x:Key="SpiralSlicesTurret"
                         Alpha="{dx:Degrees 180}"
                         GunCooldownMs="80"
                         TurnAfterShoot="{dx:Degrees -16}">
    <g:MultiBullet BaseTexture="bullet1"
                   CollisionBoxScale="0.4"
                   Count="5"
                   DegIncrement="{dx:Degrees 3}"
                   DuplicateCooldownMs="80"
                   R="8">
        <b:RadialMovementBehavior Vr="200" />
        <b:CircularMovementBehavior Aper="-10" Vper="-10" />
    </g:MultiBullet>
</b:TurningTurretBehavior>

And this is the result

There's no significance to the naming of these files other than Stages.xaml. You can add new files and put new enemies, behaviors, bullets etc. in them as long as you reference them in the correct order in the PrototypePacks attribute of the root element of Stages.xaml

Building the game

You don't need to rebuild the game if you only change the XAML files – restarting the game is enough to apply the changes.

If you want to clone the whole repo and build everything from source, then you'll need Visual Studio 2017 Community and MonoGame 3.6.