Van_Artic wrote:
also why thread in the dev section? if you're a dev you should make a game with your ideas in it mr.i-know-all-about-shmups (not really, please don't make a game, just go away)
EDIT: holyshit you actually did make a game, and you couldn't possibly give it any more generic name to it so that i can't even find some footage of it on youtube, good job
Wow... like, you basically have just proven that you don't even read things in their entirety before just taking a complete crap all over them. Well played. I will now take everything you say that much more seriously. Your new nickname is "Mr. Credibility".
I'm not defensive about that game. I have gone on the record very publicly saying I didn't think it was very fun. I have beaten it, of course, several times and I have gotten extremely mixed feedback on it. Nobody has said it was a great game, the most they have said was that it was "nice" or "pretty fun" and I think one person said... addictive? But that word gets thrown around so much these days it has no meaning to me. I have showed it to developer friends and they all agree that the meteors hitting the ground mechanic is an epic fail. Which is fine. I actually didn't even name that game. My friend did. The real story was... "hey, lets make a generic retro game"... and I looked at the list of games he showed me, and I picked the first one on the list. And it was Astro Smash. So, we said... Astro... Meteor... Smash... Crush... had a quick lol and then started working on it.
I finished the development of it after the other guy went to go work on another simple retro game and when I started it was basically unplayable. I took an unplayable game and turned it into a 2.7 game with some tweaks and tricks and rule changes over the course of about a month. No advertising, no promotion. I just wanted to establish a minimalist base line of what would happen if you took a really, really minimalist design and made it as good as you could within the context of what it was, and put it out there. And I am actually pretty happy with the result. I know people who have more plays and better scores than me, but what I really treasure is the feedback and comments that I have gotten. Real people who played my game and had opinions of it. You can't buy that with advertising dollars.
I have always thought that the most knowledge is always going to be possessed by the players of a genre, not by the developers of that genre... unless they are players as well. Just, players don't know how to channel that knowledge into hard and soft rules and floating point variables, goals and objectives, etc.
I mean if you want to have an argument... or a flame or something, that's nice and all but I am not really interested in "winning" the great internet wars.
As for "pissing off the target audience"... you have to understand, I highly doubt that the shmup audience is more than the population of a small city, spread out across the entire globe, mostly non-English speakers. So that's really not a valid, true or relevant statement.
"Most people should stay away from shmups. Especially millenials and up."
Down? I mean... in age... numbers go down. Confusing statement to be sure.
Even at that... yeah. You are just proving me right. I mean Christ, just put up a sign that says, "GET OFF THE LAWN YOU LONG-HAIRED HIPPIES!" I mean, at this point it's gone from an inability to evolve, to stubbornness about not evolving... to literally being and old person stuck in your ways and angry at the mere suggestion for a need to change... to pride in the genre's shortcomings and antipathy for anyone who likes anything else.
That was my guess, more or less, but I'm sure of it now.
Well, you'll be glad to know that the future happens with or without your participation. You can literally hate everything that's not the good old days... and we will just go around you and make new games, anyway. No participation on the part of people who still think Galaga is the best shmup of all time is necessary. I'm just an explorer, of sorts, I'll go into the hive and see what's up in there. So I see what's up in here. A lot of negativity, actually. But a lot of energy, as well... but what would you expect from people who play these insane games? *nods*
Anyhow, for the few and far-between who read... think of this:
Imagine you're player a shooter game and you're trying to locate hidden treasures in an area. You have 2/3 treasures but the location of the third one has been a PITA so far, you finally find it and then you're destroyed by a solid wall of bullets... and the map is re-randomized and you have to find all three treasures again. Yes, it's time to rage quit.
But without the treasure finding objective, death is just a mere inconvenience, a speed bump on the way to playing the level again 3.8 seconds later and still clearing the whole game in under and hour.
And that's really the difference... not getting shot IS THE WHOLE GAME and therefore, must be difficult, as that is the whole game's difficulty. If there are other goals, other things to do, the difficulty and frantic pace is suddenly a hindrance to a good game design. It's all relative, it's all subjective. And that's another example of the problem of "shmup" as an entire genre.