Hello everyone,
Cygni’s game director here and my first post
.
I am not much of a social media person but I do respect the Shmup community and the passion they put in the genre. Being a small community in relative terms makes it easier for myself to often come across posts or others to refer them to me to look into.
As a developer I feel that I have the duty sometimes to clarify certain aspects to an interested playerbase out there, and hope in the process to give back to the community a sense of good communication they well deserve, having myself been in their shoes many times asking similar questions to games I would like to see finished good and well.
What's important is to relay the message in good faith to the benefit of the game itself and to the genre, because even if you hate on a game of this type, should it succeed one way or the other, it will only encourage more publishers to jump on board and take chances with the genre as a whole, this is always a win win scenario for everybody.
I would like to first thank you all for your interest in Cygni, we are indeed a small team of passionate devs ourselves and we aim to provide the best we can within our ability to the game and to the players, we also very often listen to feedback from both hardcore shmuppers and casual players alike. We do have both types of players in our early testing team, some also very prominent ones in the genre providing us some good feedback from time to time. The feedback helps continue to improve on certain gameplay elements as we go.
I specifically wanted to jump in here in the hope of clarifying a few areas of interest.
The first obvious take would be to discuss the state of the game, currently the b-roll footage shown in passing during the interview is of an early alpha footage of stage01. In short, while emphasis was put on ground and boss units (which are more than one for that stage alone and have a lot of work done on them), on the flip side the entirety of the air unit system is but 25% completed, we had to rush out a playable build for the purposes of the event.
This means all (aerial patterns, aerial swarm unit placements, method of aerial enemy engagements with the player, numbers on screen, movement and timing etc..) are still being heavily developed to meet the standards we aim to achieve for the game, (in brief: relentless action, better flow). This takes creating a system in itself, since it's a never drop and go scenario, keeping in mind Cygni has a very wide play area making unit placement even more challenging. Once this is completed things will fit in much better.
To answer some of “Heli’s” questions:
“Why cant they make a normal SHMUP instead of a euro-SHMUP ?”
I’m sure we all know that the term Shmup is of a wide variety, if the question is more related to why can’t we make a modern Cave game vs something a little different, then it comes down to preference and the approach.
Cygni is not meant to be like a Cave game or claim to replace any other Shmup game. We are not even Reinventing it
. However I am confident we are daring to do new things within it.
We have played many Shmups ourselves both Euro and Japanese, some more than others and some we recently got introduced to and played to a degree before we started development on ours, for instance I personally love the original Rayforce, I could say Cygni has a lot of elements inspired from it, but can’t say the same for Cave games, however this doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate those games either. Its just different. The team’s preferences also reflect this. For instance we have also played through Sine Mora which is a perfectly fine game in its own right (and make no mistake a successfull one something publishers also look for), but it's not for us either.
So where does it leave Cygni? That’s for players to decide.
I think terminologies get a little faded and mixed up when we try to pin categorize certain games within the same genre. As developers we take a look back at “elements” in various games and pick and choose the ones we like as ideas and then imagine what those can be if pushed further and if at the end they work together at all. Keeping also in mind that most classic Shmups are 2D, switching such a genre to 3d is a whole different beast to tackle. a few pixels in a pixel art can give you a series of spectacles on screen that your eye interpolates them into. Capturing the same scope of spectacle and making it work in 3d properly is a whole different thing, I think an essay can be written on this alone
.
"Message to the makers : you can rotate your screen to get a nice 9/16 ratio, and get rid of rotation-aiming"
I can tell that you are a long time Shmup player
.
If you rotate the 16/9 aspect ratio, you are left with dead black bars on the sides on any modern monitor other than a mobile phone. This coupled with the low vertical head room and you are even shorter in space and have already sacrificed lots and achieved little unless ofcourse the game design reflects this and you are aiming for specific aesthetics.
These days most if not all Shmups are chasing the 16/9 (standard screen wide) aspect ratio with horizontal scrolling, it's easier that way for the devs, less hassle and troubleshooting, and the playground is chosen for you, you get a horizontal spacing shoot and go.
We didn’t want to follow either trend and what we were going to do with Depth play in our game was infinitely harder to achieve than either methods were going to provide and hence not going to work for us. Just getting Depth to work in Cygni correctly took months of preparation and RnD. Sometimes we wished we were developing an FPS game would've been far easier
. Most importantly we wanted a sense of scale in the game.
The first thing we did, we wanted to go in the opposite direction, back to the roots and basics but try something a little different this time. Should this one area had failed the entire game was to be abandoned or re-designed entriely to soemthing completely different.
What we have done for Cygni:
Bring back full 16:9 wide as a vertical scroller, but in order to achieve the head room, create a new camera system that tilts a limited 30 degrees and pans slightly based on player movements, give slight visual feedback on the play area in the process in order not to confuse the player of the FOV Curvature of the camera lens and now we have 16:9 X 2 effectively a large 4:3 aspect ratio doubling the playfield while still keeping vertical.
To our relief the system worked so well that nearly none of all our play testers specifically noticed the screen was even panning or tilting giving them room to maneuver.
Cygni is a hybrid Twin stick shooter, this means for aerial combat, we have very limited twin stick control given the wide playfield, but you can very well play the game without it, Twin stick is necessary for ground engagements for non homing weapons. This boils down to the “Depth elements” in the game since effectively you are shooting kilometers down in play space while also shooting only meters ahead of you. We have to remember that projectiles work differently for 2d vs 3d or 3d with 2d mechanics, which are not the cases here. You cant have 3d projectiles shoot ground and air targets on the same playfield without it looking ridiculous unless the ship itself is very close to the ground. This is why Skyforce "cheats" and has flat orthographic view + closer ground, makes hiding hitboxes easy at the cost of perspective and depth.
I hope this clarifies a few points for you all. Should anyone have any specific questions that I am able to answer or share at this stage, you are welcome and I will try to do so (although my time may be unpredictable so answers may come late or not).
Thanks again for reading through this wall of text. And hope the time spent writing it clarified some question marks you guys had.
My best wishes to you all moving forward.