Giest118 wrote:
Might want to throw this in Shmups Chat; you're asking for opinions from players, but not all of them visit the Development forum.
Keeping in mind that your platform is a phone (I'm assuming touchscreen-based, feel free to correct me), any system you create shouldn't require any kind of rapid button manipulation, like you would see in MushiFutari Maniac or Ketsui.
* My experience has been that chaining systems have the advantage of being easy to understand, but the drawback of being disproportionately punishing of screwups. The extent of that drawback depends on whether the chain reaches a "cap" in any way.
* Another kind of system that's usually easy to understand is the sort found in Crimzon Clover; you do some trick or perform a specific task to get a multiplier up, and you have until the multiplier expires to kill as many enemies as you can before it runs out and you need to perform the task again. Crimzon Clover has two of these systems in place at once; the lock-on multiplier and Break mode, both of which actually feed into each other and add considerable depth. So again, easy to understand, but with a high skill cap.
* Another easy-to-understand kind of system is the persistent counter that goes up over the course of a stage/the whole game (most Touhou games and MushiFutari Original; Crimzon Clover also has this with its Break rate).
* And of course, a lot of games have point items; they can drop from enemies, cancelled bullets, or whatever else appears in your game. Sometimes they autocollect, sometimes you need to go out of your way to steer towards them. If they autocollect, maybe they're worth less if they have to travel a long way to get to you. Maybe more point items drop if you destroy all of an enemy's turrets first. Maybe the items are where your chain system is (Yagawa medals, oooooohh). Maybe they're in freefall until you destroy a big enemy, at which point they THEN autocollect. Maybe they're worth more if you collect them at the top of the screen (Touhou, ooohhh).
Combine at least two of the above (but not all of them) and you'll have a scoring system.
You should probably have a good idea of what your scoring mechanics are and how they'll work before you do extensive work making stages, since stages are awesomest when they're designed with the scoring mechanics in mind.
I definitely wanna get the mechanics downpat before I design the bulk of the levels, for that exact reason. I'm looking into a multiplier system that rises as you play, and when you use an invincibility mechanic it ticks down as you're invulnerable, allowing newbies to abuse the mechanic, while veterans will be attempting to minimise use of the invincibility, cancelled bullets are an interesting idea but I'm not sure how I can implement them into our current gameplay. Very informative though, thanks!
Shepardus wrote:
But it goes further than that - freezes also grant you progress towards additional lives and progress towards additional bombs, so effective freezing helps you survive not just in the short run, but also helps you survive in the long run. This plays back into the scoring, as your end-game clear bonus is dependent on your life count, so you can intuitively see that better freezing will give you more points for the freeze and also a better end bonus, and players have a logical gateway into scoring by working towards improving their end bonus.
It doesn't end there, though, as it actually doesn't take much to reach the maximum life count of 10 extra lives. Here it becomes important to note that bombs freeze all bullets on the screen, including fireballs that are normally unfreezable. It also becomes important that dying grants you 25% towards your next bomb. High-level scorers can take advantage of this to commit suicide at certain times, giving them bombs that they can use to cash in to get otherwise unattainable big freezes, which grants them more points but also more progress towards lives that they can sacrifice for more bombs. All of this (and actually more) plays together in a system that immediately makes sense with the risk/reward of freezing, but offers a surprising amount of depth and optimizing both in planning routes and in executing them.
I really like that idea of tactical suicides, I'm not sure how exactly I can work it in, but I'll keep it at the back of my mind while I play with stuff, hopefully I can get it in there in some way.
Our game features no bombs, yet, since we don't really have a way to implement them into a touch screen, but I have a few ideas I'm gonna try out to see if they're more viable than I think.