If you have one, what is your preference for movement speed?

[blossom]

Something a bit peculiar I've noticed as I'm bouncing around in this genre, making a list of which games interest me to the point I'd like to clear them, is there's a common link between the ones which do make the list: games like 19XX, Cho Ren Sha, Giga Wing, Rayforce, all of them have one fixed and comfortable movement speed. I guess as someone who's not cleared too many shooters, this makes a game feel more approachable as opposed to any of the alternatives.

Might as well take the opportunity to do a poll. For reference, here is how I'd rank the different methods of handling movement speed, and I'd be curious to know how others would rank such a list beyond your number one choice.

1. one fixed and comfortable movement speed (as listed above)
2. multiple and adjustable movement speeds (Thunder Force, Image Fight, R-Type Deta, etc)
3. Cave-style focus (Cave games, Blue Revolver, etc)
4. Touhou-style focus (Touhou, eXceed 3rd, etc)
5. icons that gradually increase your speed (Gradius, R-Type, most Toaplan games, etc)

[reckon luck]

Cave > fixed > Thunder Force >>>>>>> speed power ups

[mycophobia]

as long as the game is well designed around the mechanic then i have no particular preference. well designed: Tatsujin checkpoint recoveries at slowest speed; like little puzzles where you have to have a plan. badly designed: Same! Same! Same! checkpoint recoveries at slowest speed; Fuck You

I would say I like #2 but I know with Image Fight at least I just pick one speed and stick with it.

if I were to design a shmup I would probably not include any kind of variable speed mechanic, so #1 if I had to choose.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

Oops, I voted for CAVE-Focus style when I meant to vote Touhou-Focus style. Oh well.

Focus style systems like in Touhou/Crimzon Clover/XOP Ultra generally allow you to switch speeds faster, and allow you to switch speeds whenever you want without firing. CAVE style allows you to make a game with fewer buttons but generally has less freedom and, with the exception of DFK's quick switching when holding rapid shot, usually has a delay when switching. Focus always trumps CAVE-style, in my opinion, much as I generally enjoy Ikeda's CAVE games.

Single speed is good too (sometimes where you select your speed prior to the game starting like Dangun Feveron, GG Aleste 2) when the game is well balanced and built around the ship's speed. The only thing that ends up being potentially bad is you have to watch for pitfalls in games with large numbers of characters where ones with super slow or super fast movespeed may feel very unusual or unbalanced for the challenges faced.

I don't like games with speed icons as much since you tend to get screwed if you die and lose your speed powerups at a bad time. Very annoying, and prevalent in Konami style games. Interestingly, Gradius V uses a Focus-style movement on the analog stick, with a long push moving you at full current speed, and a short push of the stick moving you at a fixed low speed. It would have been great if you had an actual focus button to use this when playing D-Pad, would have allowed you to play with max or near max movespeed and still have an actual slow move for tight wall-hugging movement, a first for the series. Alas, if you want to do this with the Analog stick it's fiddly and you risk smacking something.

I'm also not crazy about gear-shifting mechanics in games like Eschatos or PinkSweets. It feels harder to intuitively dodge a pattern or shift speeds in the middle of dodging and makes the game feel more about memorizing what speed to use where ahead of time. Dodging feels a lot more natural when you have a single fast/slow focus button vs trying to shift rapidly between 3 to 5 different speeds.

Focus Shot, CAVE-style, and One-Speed are all good, shift and speed icons bad.

As an aside, I wish the poll were done so you could cast multiple votes (approval voting) which you can do by setting the # of votes you can cast equal to the number of choices there are when you create the poll thread. Plurality style votes where you "pick one and done" out of a number of options suck at being able to provide information. Plurality voting systems are fundamentally awful and broken, which is why it's also ridiculous that they're widely used in political elections still. :'(

[BrainΦΠΦTemple]

after i selected "adjustable speed" i thought about it for a minute, and now i don't know :s

..i guess the type of movement speed is context dependent on the overall design of the game and whether it was implemented well or not.

[MathU]

I generally prefer systems with one fixed speed and game design optimized around that speed. If your movement system has normalized diagonal movement (i.e., less than the sum of two cardinal direction vectors), you can even get a little creative and throw some attacks at the player that require fine dodging with diagonal movement. I've always thought the hold-a-button-to-slowdown system was counter-intuitive and if anything there should be a button held to go faster. Gear shifting systems would be the ideal way to handle more than two speeds, but I can't say I've come across any game that implements them in an intuitive manner. Memorizing your precise current speed and calculating the number of taps you need to press in order to move to the desired speed in a tight situation is loathsome. I'm pretty close to two-looping Japanese arcade Image Fight (no autofire cheat) and I must confess it still feels cumbersome even at my stage of development. In my ideal gear-shift system, the gear shifting would not be unidirectional and just roll over at max. Instead, the player should have a way to speed up or speed down at will. This can be done with two separate inputs or perhaps with another input held while the gear-shift button is pressed.

Also speed-up items are kind of a fun system in an emergent game design sense. They essentially function as land mines.

As an aside, I wish the poll were done so you could cast multiple votes (approval voting) which you can do by setting the # of votes you can cast equal to the number of choices there are when you create the poll thread. Plurality style votes where you "pick one and done" out of a number of options suck at being able to provide information. Plurality voting systems are fundamentally awful and broken, which is why it's also ridiculous that they're widely used in political elections still. :'(

Hah, are you me? That's exactly what I was thinking. Some kind of score vote poll (approval voting is score vote with only two ratings) would give a lot more information here.

[Shepardus]

Where does a game like Dangun Feveron fall, where you have multiple selectable speeds at ship selection but cannot adjust in-game? Also games with multiple characters with different speeds.

People calling adjustable speed systems "gear shifting" makes me think the ideal system would be a literal gear-shifter complete with stick-shift peripheral.

I'm fine with speed powerups as long as it's easy to get and keep the speed you want like in Gradius (and arguably TwinBee), and not like Truxton where you're forced to go for max speed or else dodge powerups and give up much of your score. Also helps to have a usable base speed, unlike Gradius.

If I remember correctly, Nomltest has at least three different movement speeds depending on which weapon you're using (button 1, button 2, or button 1+2). This is kind of like CAVE-style focus, but expanded to more than two speeds.

I've always thought the hold-a-button-to-slowdown system was counter-intuitive and if anything there should be a button held to go faster.

I've seen games that do that, in particular I can remember Minishoter RS Delta has a "dash" button. Suguri and Sora too, though that's a bit different.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

Some kind of score vote poll (approval voting is score vote with only two ratings) would give a lot more information here.

Are you trying to turn me on? Because it's working. I'm a huge believer in range/score voting as being vastly superior to "pick one" voting systems. Any election where you can't provide feedback about all the options/candidates or where voting honestly can hurt you by getting you a worse result than voting "strategically" is a broken system. The fundamental lack of awareness throughout society or discussion about this is a huge deal and it's really important to raise awareness of what a truly good voting system looks like. Range/score voting should be the norm.

Where does a game like Dangun Feveron fall, where you have multiple selectable speeds at ship selection but cannot adjust in-game? Also games with multiple characters with different speeds.

I consider these "single speed" type games, just with a "pick your character (speed) at the start". As long as the game is balanced for a middle-of-the-road setting and isn't wildly unplayable at the minimum they're usually fine.

People calling adjustable speed systems "gear shifting" makes me think the ideal system would be a literal gear-shifter complete with stick-shift peripheral.

You could actually seriously do this, use a stick for movement but have a separate gearshifter from a steering wheel mapped to speed, with buttons on top for firing, etc, I know I have one somewhere for pc, lol

I've always thought the hold-a-button-to-slowdown system was counter-intuitive and if anything there should be a button held to go faster.

Yeah, this seems pretty rare as an option in focus-button for speed adjustment games. The only one I have seen is the XOP Ultra games which is a shot/bomb/shot type change/focus speed 4 button game where you have a Touhou-style focus button that doesn't alter your shooting at all and can switch on the fly between 2 equipped weapons. There's an option to make your default speed the slow speed and turn the focus button into your high speed movement.

[Austin]

I don't really have a preference as long as it fits with the rest of the game's design choices. For bullet hell games I prefer the focus shot mechanic, but on the flip side I can't imagine doing that in, say, classic R-Type.

[ciox]

Focus is cool when lots of bullets are flying around, I prefer the Cave type for less buttons.
Reverse focus is also cool, like in Psyvariar where you can spin around your ship to both increase speed and reduce hitbox. (roll button is non-canon)
Fixed is cool, I like it in games with medium amounts of bullets, simplicity is good.
3+ selectable speeds is overkill and should only be used if you have some kind of special mechanics built around it, like using overdrive to beat a strong current or something.
Speed powerups are annoying but they've mostly been phased out a long time ago.

If I had to say what my favorite is, I dunno, it's a tie between focus mechanics and fixed, whenever I play a good fixed game I don't wish that it had a focus, and when playing a focus game it's pretty obvious why it needs a focus.

[BIL]

Echoing others above, I'm happy with whatever provided it gels with the rest of the game. I've always regarded STGs as more of a bullshit-minimising template than a formalised genre. I think Image Fight's adjustable speed was a good move for classically terrain-bound IREM design, as was R-Type Delta adopting it a decade later. However having to balance precision movement and macro-dodging speed in Gradius V was a good time as well. (singling out GV as its rolling speed gauge lets you have it both ways - I wouldn't complain if this was retroactively applied to the earlier games).

I've never once wanted a speedup item in Rayforce or Metal Black, those games' slightly heavy handling always felt bang-on given their corresponding relatively conservative bullet/enemy speeds. I'd mention Raiden Fighters Jet and Dangun Feveron as examples on the opposite end of the spectrum, but I'd prefer to cite games with a single blazing-fast ship choice and I'm blanking ATM.

I tend to dislike it when Type #5 (speedup item) games use said pickups as quasi-minefields. Feels inherently chintzy. Just design a hazard that fucks up your controls or something. Salamander 2 (AC) and Super R-Type (SFC, possibly its arcade basis R-Type II as well) do this at points.

For these types of games I also prefer there to be either a "speed down" pickup, or a solution like Gradius V's aforementioned rollover (boost beyond max speed = return to base speed, which also throws up some interesting complications with it taking you from one extreme to another).

[BareKnuckleRoo]

However having to balance precision movement and macro-dodging speed in Gradius V was a good time as well. (singling out GV as its rolling speed gauge lets you have it both ways - I wouldn't complain if this was retroactively applied to the earlier games).

I was always disappointed Gradius V actually had a "slow movement" option that was restricted to being available only if you were using the analog stick. I wish it had committed to modernizing the Gradius formula more by having an honest-to-goodness dedicated slow move button for D-Pad/arcade stick players, because with the small hitbox you can really sneak up to or through some tight situations. One of my dream game hacks. TAKE NOTES, GRADIUS VI DEVS.

For the most part you can actually dodge everything with 2 or 3 speedups, and there's only the one high speed section where you need at least 4 speedups to move fast enough. The ability to reset your movespeed was nice too instead of being locked in, TOO BAD, MAX SPEED LOL if you speed up too many times. Due to the sheer number of powerup items the game tends to throw at you there's plenty of opportunities to go -> Initial Speed, SpeedUp x 2 and get back to a reasonable speed again with minimal delay.

[BIL]

I distinctly remember discovering GV's analogue control in that mine-choked corridor leading to Gunwall, and between the ultra-fine movement of the Vic and the mines, briefly wondering if I was either imagining things or witnessing a bug. I think I'd actually been using the analogue stick as my primary input the whole fortnight or so it took to reach that point, too! A holdover from previously clearing the vastly less formidable Neo Contra, which IIRC had similarly fine response on the left stick.

[6t8k]

Going to echo what some others have said, it has to fit with the rest of the game design, first and foremost. Together it has to make for a coherent rendition, there are games that achieve this well and games that fare worse in that regard.

Variable movement speed certainly can enrichen the gameplay by making it more dynamic / opening more perspectives. Think for example, checkpoint recoveries after being reset to default speed (well.. if that aspect is a plus may be debatable for many players, hah),
or Cave (mid-)bosses being able to fire much denser patterns at you, because you're expected to predominantly use the stronger, but decelerating laser here.

There is one variant that I think would be interesting to see if it could at all work well, namely movement speed being increased automatically, seamlessly, over the course of a stage that in turn is designed to acommodate for that.

The ideal for me is still that a game would be designed around just one fixed, comfortable movement speed as well as possible, so I voted that.
But see that in the context, that I don't know how I'd have voted, had I played Cave games for a longer time now than I have

I've always thought the hold-a-button-to-slowdown system was counter-intuitive and if anything there should be a button held to go faster.

I've seen games that do that, in particular I can remember Minishoter RS Delta has a "dash" button. Suguri and Sora too, though that's a bit different.

Dogyuun has that as well, if you collect the blue shell powerup-thingy. It's such a fun mechanic. The Rayxanber series too, I believe.

[FRO]

It really depends on the game. I'm not sure a Thunder Force-style variable speed system would work in a danmaku with large swaths of bullets to fly through, just like I don't know that a 2-speed Cave kind of setup would work in Thunder Force, or in many other classic styled shooting games. My preference overall would be variable speed, but if it wouldn't be a good mechanic for some types of games, I wouldn't want it to be implemented arbitrarily. I like when games give you options, such as Crimzon Clover, where your ship has 2 speeds, but then each of the ships you can choose from have differing base speeds that inform their focus shot speed. I think that's a good compromise, in that scenario.

[trap15]

I've never once wanted a speedup item in [...] Metal Black, those games' slightly heavy handling always felt bang-on given their corresponding relatively conservative bullet/enemy speeds

It's amusing that you say that, apparently the Tarabar Edition version (weird version the programmer made for some friends I guess) adds a speed up item

[BIL]

Not surprised tbh. I was rewatching some old STGW episodes this past weekend, and I'd completely forgotten how fast and twitchy some of MB's enemies can get (stage 4's in particular). But since the quasi-aura shot insulates you from them, the lower ship speed always worked for me - lots of fine tapping and feinting while attackers haplessly burn up. Could imagine it being a pain if the player is either unaware of, or not exploiting the shot. Seems to happen a lot with MB (st4 bubble outrage - oh hell no, don't run from 'em bros! ).

So I guess I'd moderate my answer to: heavier handling is fine by me, provided there's some offsetting compensation (in Rayforce's case, the relatively small hitbox helps a lot). Basic design principle, needless to say.

Now I'm thinking of Gun.Smoke, which I've seen turn people apoplectic because BIRRY's generous frontal firepower is balanced by a total lack of BACKSHOT. But fortunately he's more maneuverable than the game's dreaded Grey zako (even moreso with the speedup), something adept players will use to reverse would-be backstabs.

Offhand, this is my favourite example of avatar speed playing a critical role in a shooter. The speedup is handy, and the game ensures an adept will rarely be without it, but your base speed is more than sufficient to outmaneuver backstabbers. Make Billy's base speed a Gradius-esque trudge, and G.S would go from merely "tough" to "hellish torment," as Mr. Poieo convinced himself in his cross-eyed fury (he apparently mixed up the AC and NES controls - you know he mad ).

So RE the title question, yet again it's less about the method, more its balancing with the rest of the game. To make an organic analogy, games are systems - lots of interacting components making up the final effect. It's important to consider those components not only in isolation, but in relation to the rest. Something that would destroy one game might produce excellent results in another. Don't give your dog chocolate! Don't give your blistering bullet-riven Contra run/gun a Prince of Persia Real Platforming Simulator handling model!

[Elixir]

Touhou-style where the focus shows the hitbox (so, not like EoSD). Usually in things like Gradius I'm touching speed twice and never again, I don't really like thinking about "am I at the correct speed?" while playing.