Inspired by games like Mercenary Force (Gameboy) and to a lesser degree the battle sequences in North & South(AMIGA, NES) I wanted to make a shmup where you controlled a Napoleonic army. Originally it was a game where your player character was an officer or general or something like that, who went around ordering his army to fire on people, scooping up fleeing routed troops to refill his ranks.
But this felt too haphazard and sloppy. It had all the problems of Mercenary Force, the game that inspired me yes, but generally a crummy game and something I was trying to repair, not copy(Ever had a game you wanted to be good as a kid because the concept was neat, but it just sucked design wise?). And so the game eventually evolved into a depiction renaissance era combat, with the player controlling a mixed Pike & Shot formation.
In typical shmups, two things are the essential fun of the game: Keeping stuff in line with you while you shoot at it to kill it and dodging enemy fire. Both of these player actions are enjoyable to attempt to do and then succeed at under different, changing conditions to make things interesting. The problem with my game concept was that I wanted you to have a formation of infantry under your control. Dodging projectiles with such an unwieldy, giant hit box is not enjoyable and hard to design for and so only the shooting was. So I needed some other activity to take the place of dodging so that evasion could be made a smaller part of the equation. This is where pikes came in. Defense against attacks is an option in my game, not just evasion. So while there are still projectiles in my game that should be avoided, they are usually short ranged and rare, the main danger is enemies closing with your formation before you can muster some way to deal with them. The main activity of the player is placing their shots, using their limited(for a shmup) firepower when it is most needed (killing ranged attackers, or breaking enemy shields so far in my alphas) and using your pikes to deal with other less tricky threats.
Anyway, this is just an introduction to my game, there are various other mechanics involved that are explained in my TIGSource thread about the game. You can also download the current alpha there. Even though the game is not strictly a shmup (I joke that it's a Pike & Shoot'em up) I'd still like to see what shmup fans think of it. It's still early going though (refinement and content wise), there's much more to come.
