Why shmups are such a niche genre

[qmish]

I thought you meant "sine mora = 9/10, raiden iv = 4/10" position

[qmish]

Or you could go to some space combat sims forum and tell people on there that their beloved genre went niche because it became too anal (to the point of utilizing every single key on a keyboard and demanding an expensive, analogue joystick and hours of learning and practice, no less, to be any fun at all) for its own good, and that space combat theme (which has been neglected in recent years indeed) needs more masses friendly fun blasters, because nobody in their right mind wants "realistic" physics and whatnot in this kind of game.
Personally I wouldn't say no to another, more polished and varied Freelancer, and I'd like another Zone of the Enders, and I could use more games like Sky Odyssey, but it doesen't mean shmups or flying sims must become these games, or move on in this direction. I don't think you'll find allies on such forums by disdaining the games these forums are dedicated to.

Damn that shmupsorrow77 debate was crazy.

But, actually, something in his words strikes from another viewpoint.
If you go again to communities, who grew up on old ms-dos/win98 games, you'll discover how 1) yes, they usually prefer euroshmup approach of "trying to make it advanced with hundreds of levels and weapons with power up system and story" 2) if not, then they stick to more classic stgs, hating bullethell/danmaku 3) for question why not shmupping, they gonna reply about how shmups stopped in evolution, be it about weapon systems or stages or "please make advanced AI for enemies" etc. All of that stuff which would sound retarded for fellow shmuppers, but honest and sincere for them. It would be totally different eyes, different school of thinking.

And if we go back to sorrow77 flight/space-sim/rail-shooting obsession...

Is it really a fact, that all attempts of "evolutionize" stgs end up being transforming them into other genres (fps, rail, etc)?

Also, the idea of varying stages has made my still in concept phase shmup even more esoteric. Here is what I have so far:

A six color system, in which your ship and pilot each have a color which can be the same and all enemies have one color. Bullets have the same color as enemies that fired them. Your bullets are a mix of your two colors, depending upon the levels of both gauges. You are not immune to same color bullets.

There are two gauges. One acts is the pilot gauge, and you get a game over if it empties. There is a maximum it cannot increase beyond. It is slowly decreasing at all times, with the exact speed dependent upon the relation between your pilot and ship colors. The other is your ship gauge. When this gauge is at 50% of your pilot gauge, it is considered neutral. As this goes down, your hitbox becomes larger and your shot is more heavily influenced by your pilot. As it becmes larger, your hitbox shrinks and your shot is more influenced by your ship. If it exceeds your current pilot health gauge, you enter requiem mode, in which your hitbox disappears, and your pilot health gauge starts dropping faster, dropping even faster as it exceeds by more. If it empties, you enter free mode, in which you cannot graze and your hitbox is at it's largest. You have only your pilot color in free mode.

Enemies will drop two kinds of item: ship items, which raise the ship gauge, and pilot items, which raise the pilot gauge. Ship items are the same color as the enemy that dropped them, pilot items are of a different color, which is constant for all enemies of one color. In requiem mode, only ship items drop. In free mode, only pilot items drop. Between these two, the balance is affected by how close you are to either mode. The amount of points each item is worth depends upon how close you are to the mode in which it will not drop, with max points being awarded when the item is least common.

When not in free mode, you can destroy your ship for a bomb effect, which causes you to enter free mode. You can also, at any time, exchange your current ship with a nearby ship, exempting certain large enemies. Doing so will set your ship gauge to the value of that ship's health gauge, and your old ship is destroyed. Switching ships will damage your pilot gauge. In free mode, you can take control of a nearby ship as well, but the amount of pilot gauge lost is increased.

Grazing will raise the item multiplier. How much the multiplier increases depends upon the amount of time the bullet is grazed, pilot, ship, and bullet colors, the two gauges, and how close the bullet gets to your hitbox. Each color has a relation with each of the other colors, which each have a multiplier. These are multiplied by the base bullet value to determine how much the item multiplier goes up. They are also used in calculating the value of destroyed enemies and collected items, though those use 1/bullet color multiplier. The normal graze multiplier are also used to determine how quickly your pilot gauge drops. Increases are calculated per frame. The balance between the color multipliers is determined by the value of both gauges. A high ship gauge means your ship's color is more important, and a low ship gauge means the pilot color is more important. As the bullet gets closer to your hitbox, the pilot color becomes more important, and the ship color becomes more important as the bullet is closer to the edge of graze range.

Grazing and getting hit reduce the gauges as well. The same color multipliers as are used for graze value are used to determine how much. Grazing is only affected by the relationship between bullet color and ship color. Getting hit is affected by the relationships between bullet, ship, and pilot colors.

Enemy appearance are dependent upon player actions.

On top of all this, there is a story that makes David Lynch films seem comprehensible.

wow

I was just thinking, a lot of people complain shmups are too short because you can credit feed through them and "beat" it in less than an hour, but as we all know with some of our favorites we've played them to death and keep coming back for more, easily logging 50, 75, or 100+ hours into them. I wonder if its too late in this day and age to get this fact of true replayability into anyones heads these days unless some achievement has explicitly told them so...

But these games, if played properly, can easily compare to the time one puts into a typical RPG or other game.

There is difference between playing one game's content 10 times or playing 10 times more content at that time. So, basically, modern gamers would ask for 30 unique levels in shmup instead of playing 6 levels 5 times.

Dariusburst CS tried things... instead of doing procedural random generation, they handcrafted hundreds of missions. But this fails in eyes of non-fans because "content" (enemies, levels, bosses) is the same, just different patterns/mixes of sets. Still, CS mode is cool in how it basically gives you chapters, where each chapter is several levels at once.

http://shmups.system11.org/viewtopic.php?t=22905

That thread reminded me of:
My friend wants a game where bullets will be rotating circles, and player should be able to fly through them.

If I play a game like Graidus V with the aiming laser vs playing Ikaruga, I'll take gradius V every time. Ikaruga for me had major problems with what I call "constrained options", that is, the game doesn't have much to do beyond move, shoot, absorb... the environment was sterile and lacking in interactivity, you couldn't say grab enemies, chuck them around, etc... now I know this was Ikaruga (arcade port) but my point is Ikaruga is the symbol of why the shmup genre died out.

Dunno if somebody told him about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boogie_Wings

why can't your plane grow arms (mecha) and toss enemies into other enemies, and have them bounce off one another? Imagine doing chains by chucking enemies into enemies by predicting the bouncing path!

Also interesting. Reminds me Every Extend Extra where your suicide lead to chain of nearby enemies one by one.

[Magma Dragoon]

There is difference between playing one game's content 10 times or playing 10 times more content at that time. So, basically, modern gamers would ask for 30 unique levels in shmup instead of playing 6 levels 5 times.

Dariusburst CS tried things... instead of doing procedural random generation, they handcrafted hundreds of missions. But this fails in eyes of non-fans because "content" (enemies, levels, bosses) is the same, just different patterns/mixes of sets. Still, CS mode is cool in how it basically gives you chapters, where each chapter is several levels at once.

Think it like this, disregarding 1CC/credit feeding: once you played through a shmup's five or so stages for about one hour and a half, you've practically seen everything the game has to offer, and most shmups give practically zero real incentive to replay it, like unlockables, new ships, different endings, etc.

[qmish]

That's why comparison to fighting games or tabletop war games come, though they are multiplayer unlike stg.

And how in stg it's player who progresses, not the game

[Doctor Butler]

I posted it before, but it suits this thread better...

So, there was a relatively big forum where i'm a frequenter and of course there was a thread about shmups. And after some discussions there i gathered data of what "usual gamers" want from shmups:

- prefer health bar instead of life count
- hate being pushed back to checkpoint or level start when you die
- hate starting game from beginning when loose all lives
- would love to have something that will make game more diverse for multiple walkthrough (different routes like OutRun/Darius, or even randomised patterns/levels every time) because it's boring and shitty for them playing the same game over and over trying to learn patterns over and over (and NOPE, they dont give a thing about your complex scoring)
- disagree that game over is game over unless it's permadeath roguelike (double standards?)
- would like to save at every level/start playing from any level
- they honestly think that you, guys, who spend 10,20,50,100+ hours in shmup and then can sit and virtuosly 1CC game are insane/out of mind/have too much time to kill
- wanna have long single player campaign with different levels and everything (and big NOPE to loops, of course)
- demand weapon system like in fps/tps instead of power ups
- constantly whine about lack of A.I. of enemies in shmups
- say that game should have both "mode for normal people" and "for those crazy 1cc guys"

The thing is that it wasn't a forum of you average Uncharted 5: Call of Infamous fans. No, that was damn freaking forum of old-gamers. Though, mainly PC oldgamers. They play Jagged Alliance 2, X-Com: Ufo Defense, Planescape Torment, Doom 1-2 on Ultraviolence (or sometimes at Nightmare), Blood, Warcraft II, Fallout, Carmageddon, Hexen etc. So you can't just go out and call them a bunch of "modern casuals". Yet they criticize shmups for many things and consider them having "simplistic and foolish game design" (if i m not imaginating things) and , yes, that "lack of content" problem.

I can't call them "Modern Casuals", but I can certainly call them "Old Casuals", lol

[BIL]

Sounds like a bunch of save-scumming fannies tbh.

[WelshMegalodon]

It's kind of what PC gamers have traditionally wanted, though, isn't it? Diversity and options and things, as opposed to quality "action" or mastery or whatever. It's a difference in philosophy between arcade and PC gamers that isn't brought up enough in spite of its ubiquity, or something like that.

[qmish]

Sure, some of them good enough they never save in any game or save for level at maximum. And that's one side, another is their need for "advanced" "complicated" "possibilities". Like they treat Front Mission as primitive and inferior because "you should have impact on game how physics from bullet destroys cabin and pilot with explosion of fuel tank that was on a way; instead of simple tabletop like ruleset". Or, again, like guy from that thread who was asking for development of "ubershmup" that "evolves everything into wonderful possibilities" like "its not just move and shoot but also kamikaze in enemies, grab them with hands, chain them by bouncing them back arkanoid-style, use environment as weapon"





"innovation" seems more interesting than fun?

I've been to both sides, but this radical contrast between perception of things still puzzle me. Reminded me how recently i had an argue about map/level design in FPS titles, where some people were nearly suprematists about "how levels were simplified from non-linear labyrinths to one long reskinned corridor".

[Shepardus]

Or, again, like guy from that thread who was asking for development of "ubershmup" that "evolves everything into wonderful possibilities" like "its not just move and shoot but also kamikaze in enemies, grab them with hands, chain them by bouncing them back arkanoid-style, use environment as weapon"

But that does sound like fun

[qmish]

On a 2nd thought - yeah, too bad this idea was buried into debate whether author was a troll or not

edit:

Some occasional finds.

You could go one further than those traditional composites, and have a creative SHMUP by having an organism that shoots a specially chosen projectile at biomatter to alter it into another form, or have the player character be immobile in a traditional sense, but be able to move by shooting a spore, which becomes a new incarnation of the player character.

This is where they take what appears to be `the genre formula` and basically do exactly the same thing without going outside of the box. That means, boring enemies which fly in a sequence following a preset animation path and shooting hot little bullets in the direction of the player, then flying off-screen. I mean.... almost every one of them does that the same way, with no other significant AI, and it's just really boring. That's the part of it that I find to have been done to the death, and if that's all people are bringing to the table then that does make it seem like the genre is totally used-up. But that's only because people are not innovating enough.

I really wish someone would do something original with a shootemup, but unfortunately what I mostly see are really boring movement patterns, predictable waves, end of level boss, various weapons bla bla bla... a bit kind of formulaic. And often the `spaceship` is just not as engaging as, say, a `character` in a platform game. So maybe they tend to be a bit cold and dull and harder to relate to? Plus they're really a super-solo experience most of the time and things have become a lot more social in gaming in general so they maybe represent a genre frozen in time that hasn't moved on very well. Anyone agree?

just making some alien sprites move along a pre-designated path is not engaging. It's way too much `on rails`. I think maybe that's why platform games have survived better, because they offer puzzle elements and interactions with enemies that have some kind of AI behavior, and stuff happens much more dynamically and unexpectedly which keeps it interesting.

I think it would be neat to have annual arcade-challenge development competitions for [game development] students. Thinking about what makes a good arcade game is a fun mental exercise. It's also a segment of the industry that saw a lot more stability and refinement over the years. (being one of the first large-scale applications of game design)

Gaming has become a lot more social and most shmups are still single-player reflex games. You'd be hard pressed to find many 2-play or multi-player shmups at all. I can barely think of any. So they've sort of stayed in a box of isolation, and this is partly also why almost every shmup people make still stays heavily confined in a box that copies everything that was done already

Enemies are basically brainless moving in simple patterns rarely reacting to the players presence. The same can be said of most platform games (and heck many games from other genres for that matter) but the difference is the player has more choices available. You can jump, perhaps climb, you may do a close combat attack (even if just jumping on an enemy's head) or a range attack, you can often jump and/or duck to avoid being hit and so forth. Compared to shmups platformers offer a huge amount of choices. A greater number of ways to interact with the game world.

Nearly all of them [enemies] float across the screen in fixed patterns often completely unaware of the player. One may come out, move 1/4 of the way across the screen stop and fire twice then continue on. Another may do the stop and fire pattern every 1/3 of the screen it moves. Another may move across in a straight line firing every 2 seconds. Another comes out in a wave pattern and so forth.

Send out some mindless pattern based enemies. That is fine. But then send out some intelligent enemies. Give enemies roles. Maybe you catch up to an enemy that is flying back and forth collecting power cells. It has a purpose. Then give it some guards. 4 to 5 heavily shielded enemies that fly around behind it engaging you while also trying to take everything you are throwing out. If that gatherer enemy collects 10 cells it flies off screen. It got away. At another point maybe you find a couple friendly ships that are attacking an enemy base and taking heavy damage. You need to defend them and help destroy that base. Stuff like that. Then focus on the interaction. Give the player a shield button in addition to the fire button. Give them a certain amount of energy that takes a bit of time to replenish. It is a choice. Attack or shield. Add more interaction to the game. If shield is on and you collide with an enemy you send it flying back across the screen if it collides with an enemy (or two or three) they all explode. Maybe the player can send out some kind of mines that attach to enemy ships and explode also taking out any enemies that are very close to that one.

It's from here
https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/where ... ps.239566/
game dev forum, basically. 80% of thread is "stgs are all the same complaint" + 10% "nah its arcade and deal with it" + 10% of some actual ideas formulated (i bolded what i found more interesting).

[Major Stryker]

Hi new guy here. I love that there is a forum dedicated.to shmups! Rock on!...
I can see this has been discussed in depth already, but I'll add my two cents.
I think most people are already engrossed in the new era of games and these shooters, shmups, etc are kind of a nod to the old days in the arcade. (At least for me.) I know they release new titles for these, but they never seem to gain any popularity beyond a small group of gamers...Maybe its really just to difficult for your average hold my hand through the tutorial type gamer..
I personally love to play these games co op with a buddy. My former room mate and I used to play Gun Bird 2 for months on end just trying to master that game. Its not the greatest shmup or game for that matter, but the thrill of not dying and memorizing patterns is really what makes it fun to me. These games weren't meant for everyone and I think that is a compliment to everyone who enjoys these games and are good at them. Thats all for now.

[WelshMegalodon]

I think most people are already engrossed in the new era of games and these shooters, shmups, etc are kind of a nod to the old days in the arcade.

You are aware that nonlinear open-world gaming has been around since the early 80s and that the "save anywhere, do anything" mentality has coexisted with the arcade approach for the past 40 or so years? Handholding does appear to be a more recent trend (I've often seen people point to the PlayStation era as the generation that birthed that approach), but it's not like we haven't had easy games, and there always has to be some kind of guidance so that we actually know how to play.

The North American release of Final Fantasy (a very casual game by Bard's Tale standards) came with dungeon maps, a bestiary, and a walkthrough for half the game. This was in 1990...

[qmish]

Bestiary is cool! Especially unlockable in game

[Shepardus]

Regarding this quote:

Send out some mindless pattern based enemies. That is fine. But then send out some intelligent enemies.Give enemies roles. Maybe you catch up to an enemy that is flying back and forth collecting power cells. It has a purpose.

I do think there is potential here. The option hunter in the Gradius series did this to some degree nearly 30 years ago - it poses a nonstandard obstacle (stealing the otherwise invulnerable options rather than killing the Vic Viper like everything else does) and may appear at different times depending on factors like how many options you have. The way it tracks your position and the dynamic nature of the option hunter's appearances (and the fact that you can't simply shoot it down) really makes it feel like a sort of rival/assassin after you, injecting some extra life into the game. I can't think of much like that within the genre, but there's no reason why everything has to be confined to scripted patterns as opposed to more "systemic" rules/behaviors. Non-fixed, "dynamic" behavior doesn't necessarily lead to a chaotic mess, you just need to communicate behaviors clearly so players can form a mental model of the underlying systems (this is not unique to shmups or even games).

I know they release new titles for these, but they never seem to gain any popularity beyond a small group of gamers...Maybe its really just to difficult for your average hold my hand through the tutorial type gamer..

Shmups are some of the simplest games to pick up and play, though, and many newcomers aren't aware of how difficult and complicated they can become, unless their only exposure to the genre is through some YouTube video priding a shmup on its difficulty (though I bet that's where a lot of people come from). Many popular games these days, including some of the most popular, require a ton of investment to learn and even more to master, so I really don't think it's that gamers have gotten too soft to handle shmups. In my experience, the few times I've shown shmups to other people their reaction wasn't "it's interesting but looks too hard for me," they just weren't interested to begin with. Asking players to entertain themselves by taking a simple surface and optimizing it to hell and back is a tough sell these days when there's so many other choices.

[Magma Dragoon]

You remember Xevious? The game that basically codified the Shmup genre? It had those flying enemies which moved the fuck away the second you got close to them. I don't remember any other shmup doing something similar to this.

[Kollision]

gyrodine, twin cobra?

[Jeneki]

Raiden II stage 6.

[WelshMegalodon]

Don't forget the original TwinBee.