RNG in Shmups: Love It or Hate It?

[Rastan78]

RNG in shmups can come in many flavors, mild or spicy. What have you observed in games, and did it keep the game fresh or drive you crazy?

Here's an incomplete list:

Mild RNG: A few random bullet spam patterns, boss movements or boss attack cycles. Just enough so that rote memorization won't work every time everywhere.

Getting Warmer: Random stage order. You might struggle with one stage. Get lucky and have it appear as stage 1 and you're good. It comes at stage 4 and you choke. Score might be slightly affected by RNG as well.

Powerup and item/medal drop cycles. They might not technically be unpredictable, but in practice they will have you abandoning your route here and there as you scramble to pick something up.

Red Hot: Random value scoring items. Or totally different bosses appearing with highly skewed scoring potential. Here is where pro players looking for top scores might be resetting even when playing perfectly simply due to RNG killing the score. Nerves of steel needed to close out a high scoring run accompanied by once in a lifetime good luck.

I'm interested in learning about how and where randomness appears across the genre as well as what players feel about it.

So does RNG truly reward the player who can handle the hot sauce? Or does it unfairly punish innocent shmuppers who haven't done anything wrong? Just remember: if you do become a victim of RNG, it's not your fault.
https://youtu.be/GtkST5-ZFHw

[To Far Away Times]

Static is best. I like being rewarded for memorization.

[Starfighter]

The further into a shmup I play the less RNG I tolerate, I think. I don't mind react-on-the-fly stuff but if I'm veeeery close to getting a 1CC and something totally unexpected happens that might put me off.

[Lethe]

We're talking about at least two different concepts here: random selection and "schematic" randomness.

Random selection is, well, random selection. It can be as innocent as the Psikyo school's stage order, or as bastardly as the Raizing school where the boss can fuck you over by doing only its hardest or lowest-scoring patterns.
Schematic randomness is the continuous to selection RNG's binary. Chaotic zako positions, Cave boss movement, Touhou patterns, etc.
Many games combine both styles but will lean one way or the other.

One of the biggest appeals of STGs is that they are highly "grammatical": there's a very clear and distinctive behavioral relationship between the game and the player. But it's a mistake to think that if you can't win by following the same sequence of positions every time that schematic RNG is all random dodging or bullshit - instead, it emphasizes grammar by encouraging understanding the game on an abstract level. You're still solving patterns and manipulating enemies through knowledge and memorization, you're just applying it in a fluid and adaptive way that might not be immediately obvious. Of course it doesn't always work out like that because if the implementation is bad then it'll become bullshit.

Meanwhile random selection is inherently anti-grammatical even if the selected outcomes are static! The player barely interacts with the process at all. It's a powerful way to build tension in a run and keep the game going, but it's no end in itself. It relies on the game being attractive enough in the first place for the player to accept it as part of the experience, as opposed to schematic randomness which is self-evidently entertaining from the start (at least IMO).

In the end it just depends on the particulars of the game. Would Gunbird 2 see less play if the coin timings were random? Probably not. If the patterns were random though...

[BareKnuckleRoo]

I agree with the previous comments about memorization. Humans are good at that sort of thing so it's a natural fit when it comes to "solving" shmups.

Mild RNG: A few random bullet spam patterns, boss movements or boss attack cycles. Just enough so that rote memorization won't work every time everywhere.

I'd categorize these as being quite different. A slow bullet spray attack where the bullets are semi random and thus you can't memorize your way through them is fine. Random enemy attack cycles or movement can be quite different though.

If the boss in question has a large movelist and RNG can potentially cause it to choose multiple VERY nasty attacks in a row, that's bad. Monolith's last boss has a gigantic number of different possible attacks it can use before its final phase which is a fixed cycle, and some are a harder than others. It's not unfair, but there's a definite luck element. CAVE's Progear is probably the best example of this implementation. Each boss is configured to have 3-4 different attacks, but their health is such that each phase will eventually use all of them (or most of them for stage 3 boss onwards). The attacks also are deliberately configured to be similar in terms of difficulty, so the RNG element isn't what attacks you'll see, but rather feels more like it's which order the attacks come out.

[Creamy Goodness]

Mostly hate it. There are some slight instances where it works, but that is far from the norm. Like I do not understand how anyone can enjoy a roguelike shmup. That seems like a major exercise in frustration. Most of my play is based on memorization and routing, so randomness kills that. Even Psikyo's random stage orders or Battle Garegga's ever changing rank mess with me.

[PerishedFraud ឵឵]

Scoring RNG is a shitshow, be it random spawns, random bosses (eat shit sonic wings), random scoring items, etc etc.

Notably the amount of score per variation is what's important. If there are different waves I can get, but surviving and killing them gives the same score, then the RNG of which one I get is a good thing! The moment one variation becomes worth more, the moment it turns sour.

Pattern RNG is okay as long as there's no pattern that's unbeatable. If I have to deal with a stronger attack that's just added challenge. If the attack is cheap that's not an RNG problem, rather just bad design.

On a side note, I've enjoyed Cambria Sword's rare weapon drops a lot. They can change a run completely but you'll do just fine without a single one (and some rare weapons are worse than their regular counterparts, instead just being more exotic to use). So that was a breath of fresh air considering scoring in that game was based on kills and pickups. (Though, fittingly enough, other forms of RNG make it inconsistent! Damn it...)

[chum]

I love bullet pattern rng. My favourite games (Double Spoiler, Shoot the Bullet and Fairy Wars) wouldn't have been the same without the heavy emphasis on RNG. It basically defines the gameplay in these games, and there are other games in the series that also make fantastic use of the RNG, such as Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, and both of the Phantasmagoria games.
Movement RNG on the other hand is just randomness for its own sake and rarely actually makes the gameplay more fun. So that can be a bit of a setback and the more partial movement RNG of Shoot the Bullet is preferable to the almost all-out randomness of Double Spoiler.
A lot of the other types of RNG mentioned in this thread is just almost always going to be bad unless you are ignoring score entirely.
A lot of Arcade shmups are really fun to me BUT not fun enough to play for a long period of time precisely because they don't have the pattern rng to make them exciting to play for that long. Of course there are exceptions where despite a lack of randomness the gameplay is just so damn tight and challenging (for example, Dragon Blaze!) that it can be exciting regardless, but I still have a bias towards randomness.
In other words: Love it!

[chum]

We're talking about at least two different concepts here: random selection and "schematic" randomness.

Random selection is, well, random selection. It can be as innocent as the Psikyo school's stage order, or as bastardly as the Raizing school where the boss can fuck you over by doing only its hardest or lowest-scoring patterns.
Schematic randomness is the continuous to selection RNG's binary. Chaotic zako positions, Cave boss movement, Touhou patterns, etc.
Many games combine both styles but will lean one way or the other.

One of the biggest appeals of STGs is that they are highly "grammatical": there's a very clear and distinctive behavioral relationship between the game and the player. But it's a mistake to think that if you can't win by following the same sequence of positions every time that schematic RNG is all random dodging or bullshit - instead, it emphasizes grammar by encouraging understanding the game on an abstract level. You're still solving patterns and manipulating enemies through knowledge and memorization, you're just applying it in a fluid and adaptive way that might not be immediately obvious. Of course it doesn't always work out like that because if the implementation is bad then it'll become bullshit.

Meanwhile random selection is inherently anti-grammatical even if the selected outcomes are static! The player barely interacts with the process at all. It's a powerful way to build tension in a run and keep the game going, but it's no end in itself. It relies on the game being attractive enough in the first place for the player to accept it as part of the experience, as opposed to schematic randomness which is self-evidently entertaining from the start (at least IMO).

In the end it just depends on the particulars of the game. Would Gunbird 2 see less play if the coin timings were random? Probably not. If the patterns were random though...

The way you phrased all of that makes a lot of sense. I could never put how I thought about this into words like this, but I think you are totally correct!

[Koa Zo]

You're not talking about "run 'n' gun" here, huh?
...Random number generation?

I'm drifting more out of the loop on gaming, when did RNG become an initialization that everyone casually uses in this context?

[Jeneki]

*Prays to rnGesus for forgiveness*

[davyK]

RNG and faster bullet speeds aren't really compatible as memorisation is required. With bullet hell fixed patterns are best too because you could in theory be presented with a wall of bullets that's impossible to navigate.

If the enemy patterns, bullet speed and density are tamed then RNG can produce a great experience. Asteroids is a fine example of that.

Randomising score pickups is a bit cheap - especially at higher level play.

Randomisation of level order Psikyo style can be fun though.

[pieslice]

For a reference I'll throw some examples on how the RNG is utilized in Crisis Wing - it is not very noticeable but causes subtle variety between runs.

Here's the most prominent examples:

- The power-up drop sequence is fixed (green - blue - red - blue - green - red - green - blue - red) but the first index of the sequence is random.

- The firepower of some zako enemies is randomized; some of the will choose and attack pattern that is more aggressive and some of them won't fire at all. Which pattern gets chosen is RNG.
(On the loops higher than one the pattern RNG is re-rolled once if non-firing option was chosen first)

- Some enemy behaviours have RNG properties. For instance the small green enemies in the first stage and the yellow swarming buzzers in the third stage exhibit a behavior where they try to maneuver next to your ship, loop around you and escape.
Whether they'll try to aim to your left or right side and do either clockwise or counter-clockwise loop is defined by RNG "coin toss".

- The green spinning Y-shaped ships in stage 6 rotate either clockwise or counterclockwise. Which one they'll choose is defined by RNG "coin toss".

[heli]

Battle garegga bomber sucks.

[Technicolor]

Maybe it’s worthwhile to distinguish between scoring and survival here? There are ways to have randomness only situationally, after all. Supposedly Gunbird’s stage 6 boss rush is “random” based on screen positioning, if someone more knowledgeable could confirm.


There’s also inspiration to be taken from speedrunning QoL features. For example, Spelunky has dark levels which restrict your vision, but clearing a level in under 30 seconds guarantees that the next level will never be a dark level; similarly, you could have stages that disable random enemy spawns or patterns past a certain score threshold. Or maybe certain sections generate a specific element of RNG based on the first few digits of your score, so it’s effectively random until you enter high levels of scoring optimization.


Variance that can be removed or manipulated through knowledge and/or skill opens up a lot of design possibilities. You’d have to be careful to apply it without screwing up some of the game’s initial appeal, though.

[Strikers1945guy]

I dislike it in general. It’s fine if we are talking about the fact that some bosses don’t always use attacks with the same pattern everytime (example attack 1, attack 2, attack3). That can add mild enjoyment having to be ready for one of a few things but at the same time I’ve memorized anything that can come my way.
Beyond that I don’t really want things to be completely random in levels where memorization only takes me so far … I like to be generally rewarded for memorization

[Sumez]

Not considering the implications it could potentially have on a scoring system, every action game will benefit from RNG!

A good combination of reliable predictability and ever-present uncertainty generally makes for the best challenging experience.
If a 100% predictable game has enough stuff going on to prevent completely rote replication of patterns, the player does become the source of unpredictability to some extend, but I think some well implemented RNG can always help the experience.

I'm drifting more out of the loop on gaming, when did RNG become an initialization that everyone casually uses in this context?

I want to say at least three decades ago, but then I'm a programmer...

[Aceskies]

The stage 6 boss of Akai Katana has random attacks and its driving me crazy. The very first attack can be either a super easy slow bullet cluster attack that you can dodge blindfolded, or a heavy superfast small cluster of bullets with random paths which is a nightmare. I can't see the benefit of this tbh.