^ Yeah, don't pull a Sine Mora and waste effort making and touting systems but then having WR scoreplay be "move and shoot everything else is bad"
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Would breaks between stages for purchasing break the flow of gameplay too much?
Most games with shops that I know of do it this way, so it shouldn't be a problem. FWIW, here's a short thread on shmups with shops:
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=57770
Is switching between bombs to use too much of a hassle?
Depends on the usage, I guess. If it's the usual panic-button thing, then I don't see anyone really switching to the appropriate bomb-type before using it, instead probably planning ahead what bombs they would use. While having more than 3 types of bombs might be okay, I wouldn't suggest letting the player carry more than three types, as after that cycling through them would become cumbersome.
I mean, if you want to get
really silly, you could have bombing pause the game for a bit and pull up a ring-menu so you can choose which bomb type you want to use. That... probably wouldn't be popular with too many people, though
Is that too many buttons to manage?
4 buttons would be on the upper-end of Just Fine, I'd say. Though, I guess this depends heavily on how much bomb-switching you'd have to do. If push comes to shove then I guess you could switch to CAVE's tap-vs-hold style of shot/focus.
I've heard that shmups with any sort of RPG type mechanics don't tend to be well received. How true is that and why? Not that my game would necessarily have a lot of RPG elements but I'd like to try to avoid the pitfalls with the ideas I already have.
Well, your system as you've described it now - just buying bomb attacks - sounds a lot like Trouble Witches where you buy powerful Spell Card attacks, and I've never heard anyone criticize the shop system in that game. I think where people start getting hinky with RPG/Shop mechanics is when:
a) There's a dizzying array of stuff in the shop, especially if a lot of it is really broken shit
b) You need the shops to pimp out your health so you can sponge hits
c) The currency/upgrades carry over between playthroughs, allowing you to grind away the challenge, which is antithetical to how most people approach this genre.
So, of course, its also a really popular idea with the shmups targeting people outside the usual shmupdom...
and I think these things are largely part of the "Euroshmup" stereotype.
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I guess the basic problem here is rewarding good play with a direct gameplay advantage. Either the player is bad and does extremely poorly because they never get enough of the upgrades or the player is good and does far too well cause they get a lot of them.
To be fair, this is, to a degree, a common part of the process of beating these kinds of single-sitting arcade games, if not using save-states or practice modes. You figure out how to gain and conserve resources that you then blow through trying to learn the next section, until you eventually learn the starts for that and keep your resources for the next section etc.
A static amount of currency gained per stage. In other words, the players cannot control how much currency they get to spend
Eh, I think with a currency system there should be some fun to getting it, and figuring out how to get more of it (again, see Trouble Witches). Though... definitely put a cap on how many bombs you can carry
If you consider doing a Rank system tied to spending, a thought is that maybe the Rank only starts spiking if you spend a LOT.