What's this for, as in, which directory does it need to write to that is write-protected? Or rather, why not save to c:\users\public or c:\users\current_user?

If that's for the installer, why doesn't it let you choose where to install the game to (and therefore, where save files will go)?

It looks pretty good from the screenshots.

It crashed in linux during the initial loading screen. Here is a useless stack trace.

Program received signal SIGABRT, Aborted.
[Switching to Thread 0xb7b6a6b0 (LWP 21339)]
0xb7f66410 in __kernel_vsyscall ()
(gdb) bt
#0  0xb7f66410 in __kernel_vsyscall ()
#1  0xb7bc7085 in raise () from /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc.so.6
#2  0xb7bc8a01 in abort () from /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc.so.6
#3  0xb7bffb7c in ?? () from /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc.so.6
#4  0xb7c07a85 in ?? () from /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc.so.6
#5  0xb7c0b4f0 in free () from /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc.so.6
#6  0xb7e5f3da in _al_free () from /usr/lib/liballeg.so.4.2
#7  0x00000000 in ?? ()

I tried the game in wine and it ran fine.

The game looks nice and I like the weapons. I have some of the same gripes that I had with Garden of Colored Lights.
1. one shot to be killed is annoying when the screen is littered with bullets. this just seems like an artificial difficulty
2. I confused the bullets with the background, but much less than in Garden of colored lights

but overall its still quite nice. good work!

Great game! I really like all your games aesthetic approach.
I am curious about how did you write this particular effect (I mean the trajectory of the bullets) did you use bezier curves perhaps?
http://www.allegro.cc/files/attachment/597747
I have been thinking in implement the same effect for some time.

Looks pretty awesome - no idea how you get the cool graphic fx
Anyway, good job

Actually the only part of the player ship that's vulnerable is the small white area in the centre, the part that's the same shape for all of them.

I considered giving some of the fighters defensive weapons capable of blocking bullets, but decided that would be too hard to balance.

No bezier curves. The seeker missiles work on the same principle as the worm weapons in Overgod and the charge seekers in Excellent Bifurcation.

Basically, each is a bullet object with an x/y position, x/y speeds and an angle. Each tick the bullet:
a) turns towards its target by a certain amount
b) accelerates a certain amount in <angle> direction
c) has its speed on each axis reduced by 5% or so.

This results in the curving motion.

The trails are just a series of lines between the bullet and its previous position, then from there to the next position, etc.

In WB the trails are bit more complex because instead of lines there are a series of transparent 8-bit RLE sprites drawn with do_line, but the principle is the same.

Nice graphics, and good sounds, along with a nice assortment of ships and effects. I've only made it to the second stage on normal difficulty, and that's pretty difficult to get to anyway. Perhaps a slight increase in the scoring awards might be nice.

The anemone ship with the melee weapons is too difficult to play with effectively, and the hand of Xom is really effective until you reach the 3rd area in stage 1 where the enemies movements start to be erratic.

The game says the hand of Xom ship has a closed hand and an open hand weapon, but I can't see any difference between the two. Pressing fire 2 or fire 3 just charges the thing at it's last position, but is it actually doing anything other than making noise and looking pretty? It's also not clear how to level up the 3rd weapon for the hand of Xom.

In stage 1 between the 2nd and 3rd boss, the large amount of bubbling background stuff makes it difficult to see the projectiles.

The spinneret's orb beams shorten when you move up the screen, and lengthen when you move down the screen. It makes more sense to me that they should have a variable length that is irrespective of the ship's vertical movement.

Very fun game.
Also, very hard.

I suspect that if I had a gamepad or the game supported using the mouse in some clever way it would be a bit easier. (especially with how the keyboard just loves to ignore the wrong keys when you are pressing what it decided to be too many :S)

Anyway, not that I'm very good (Highscore 11395 on normal, only got to stage 2), but one very important tip is to stress the offensive - destroying enemy ships before they get to shoot helps immensely.

It's really addictive, and really hard! I still can't pass the first level.. -__-
The graphics are well made. Maybe it's because I never played shoot 'em up games before, but most of the time, I got lost among the particles! And I even thought some of them can be picked up -___- I wish I can make something like this in the future, because I'm still stuck on my Space Invaders clone xD