2D shmup for phones

[bambucha]

moved

[Shepardus]

Ignoring for now the myriad of potential pitfalls of developing a shmup for mobile touchscreen devices...

• If you're going to have a lot of weapon options make sure you're prepared to keep the game balanced for all these options, maybe not all different combinations of these options but at least enough to make sure one optimal solution doesn't rise above the rest and eliminate any sense of meaningful choice. You should also consider how different these choices feel to the player, whether it feels like genuinely different gameplay styles or if it's just the same thing with some forgettable numbers tweaks. Games like Hellsinker and Final Boss do a good job demonstrating how different sets of weapons can make the same stages play very differently - you may want to take a look at those for inspiration. Pay attention not only to the way each character/weapon in Hellsinker/Final Boss behaves but also how the stages are designed around these different gameplay styles so that these different styles act as meaningful content rather than minor variations hardly more interesting than swapping around your controls. Level design is especially important in games like Dodonpachi where the different ship choices are pretty similar but the very tight level design makes them feel meaningfully different. Which brings me to point 2:
• Procedurally generated stages are a dangerous design trap, often used by amateur game designers as a substitute for good level design and then used to market the game as having infinite replay value. But most of the time the result isn't "infinite replay value," it's zero replay value because the game ends up not worth playing even once. With the rising popularity of roguelikes and "roguelites" procedurally generated levels have likewise risen in popularity among designers trying to infuse a "roguelike" quality into their game, but I don't believe it fits very well with shmups. The reason classic roguelikes like Nethack, DC:SS, Angband, ADOM, etc. work with computer-generated levels is because of how many complex systems they have dynamically interacting with each other. In a way, a roguelike's real "content" isn't actually the levels themselves, but the systems and elements used by the game to generate the levels. Generally shmup devs don't have the same sort of freedom to add in complex systems without overloading the player since shooting and dodging are already a lot to manage. That's not to say that shmups can't be complex, but rather they tend to get their complexity and/or depth from a smaller number of systems interacting with the shooting and dodging systems and the pressure of real-time, and this sort of interaction is very dependent on good level design since without that the shooting and dodging tends to be uninteresting and you're left with little else that is interesting. Also, many experienced shmup players would rather have levels remain predictable to a certain degree so that they can be learned and optimized, which also allows levels to be designed tougher and tighter without becoming unfair. In short, I would advise to not even think about procedurally generated levels until you're very comfortable with churning out high-quality hand-designed stages, since only then are you going to know what rules to program into a level generator.
• Sure, scoring systems are quite a big part of shmups and people compete all the time for higher scores. Try playing a good variety of shmups if you want inspiration for interesting scoring systems (especially shmups from the mid-90s and later, which is about when it became the norm for scoring systems to feature more than simple survival and/or checkpoint milking). You should make sure that a good score reflects someone who's better at the game, rather than simply who played more, though it's up to you to define what "better" means in your game.

[mzrgames]

From everything I've read about gamedev one thing was repeated in pretty much every discussion - start small.
I too started to create a shooter with randomly generated world and scratched the world part of the game after a while (even though it was working quite well). I realized it would take too long for one person to do it. So I decided to make a simpler game (an arena shooter I just released) and then think about growing it.
I'd suggest creating the most important parts first and releasing the game (especially on mobile), you can always update it with new features, but the feedback will surely help with development.

But that's me, I'm sure there are endless approaches that can work. In any case good luck.

Regarding the question about weapons - take a look at Eve Online, it has an amazing ship fitting system, where you need to really balance things out.

[bambucha]

moved

[mzrgames]

You would also be safe of decreasing your rank after you beat a boss.

Does that mean that you can loose rank before killing the boss? If that's the case how would that happen? By dying?
Assuming that's correct what would the player had to lose? Even if he died 5 times and then killed the boss his rank would be the same in the end (200 in your example).