Rhetorical question

A place for people with an interest in developing new shmups.
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qmish
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Rhetorical question

Post by qmish »

Can somebody who is not that much good at shmups, make an actually good game for others :?:
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heli
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Joined: Fri Sep 13, 2019 3:58 pm

Re: Rhetorical question

Post by heli »

I suck at SHMUPS, is my game any good ?

I mean i can make a 9CC if i,m lucky,
i am still better then any of my family and friends who dont play this genre,
they will bomb-run until no bombs and dead.
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SG-Glendon
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Re: Rhetorical question

Post by SG-Glendon »

qmish wrote:Can somebody who is not that much good at shmups, make an actually good game for others :?:
Yes. The Konami code from the NES Contra Game came about because the game was too hard for the main designer to playtest it, so he had them code in the 30 lives cheat so he could play it all the way through.
I like making stuff. Music, graphics, and now trying games... Wish me luck.
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Sumez
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Re: Rhetorical question

Post by Sumez »

I think as a designer of a truly challenging game, such as many arcade STGs are, you should probably always aim to make something that's too hard for yourself. It sounds like an oxymoron but I think that was genuinely the case with most of them out there. Though whether the designers were straight up bad at the genre is more unclear. The important thing though is that they understood the genre and had playtesters were good.

When you're making a game you're often focusing on individual bits of challenge at a time, like single patterns and a series of them, a single boss fight etc. And I think at the very least you should be able to survive those parts at least more than once, without getting hit, through the power of your own skill, before you let it stay in the game.
Logic says that if you can do that for every individual part of the game, you can theoretically beat the whole game, too. Maybe it's unrealistic for you to actually do that, but you can be damn sure someone else will within very few days from release.

But it really depends on what you're making. My personal experience also says that when you are designing a game yourself, it's very easy to get blind to its difficulty because you know it inside out, and parts that you'll get through consistently without thinking twice about them might turn out to be a big wall to someone playing it for the first time. And some times you want that, but especially early in the game you probably want to nudge the player a bit so they don't feel discouraged.
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