Health in my shmup!?

[Captain]

A poll that addresses the stereotype that not dying in one hit is bad for gameplay.

I apologize in advance, it's slightly TLDR, but hopefully not too unbearable.

Please discard preferences and poll truthfully and objectively. I myself am not a fan.

Also imagine that aside from the health, the system is exactly as you wanted (on-hit invincibility or lack thereof, amount of health, etc)

[Squire Grooktook]

My ideal system (which I'm adding to my own shmup WIP's), is that you can only have a set number of lives at a time (3 probably), but extends are plentiful. Think Batrider.

I think this gets the best of both worlds. You can recover even from the brink of death, but you're never truly safe from annihilation because you can't stockpile resources.

Dunno where that fits on the poll.

Also I personally prefer for "lives" to "look" like health. IE you don't explode when you lose a life, just get knocked back. You're character doesn't die for real until last life is gone. Think Esp Ra.de/Galuda and Ether Vapor.

[Special World]

The only type of "health bar" I'm okay with is something like Deathsmiles, where you have discreet "lives" but environmental hazards don't knock out a full life. Anything where the player needs to look at the health bar to see how much health they have left (i.e. where drain 5 or 10 points from 100) are a big no-no in my book.

[Weak Boson]

I think health bars working the same as lives is basically the way to go - but systems that let you lose "half a life's worth" like Guwange are perfectly fine if implemented sensibly. I never really understood which bullets were 1HKs in that game - but if you have environmental obstacles in your game or anything nonstandard it might help it feel less cheap. Like, it would make sense if your ship has to fly into an asteroid field - getting sure damages you, but not as much as your enemies fearsome weapons.

[Perikles]

As is often the case, it entirely depends on the execution. Forgotten Worlds is a fantastic example of a game that includes a health bar, (potentially) multiple lives and even a shop, Xenon 2 Megablast - which shares all those traits - is terrible. A few Namco titles also feature astutely designed health bars of some sort (Dragon Spirit, the PCE version of Dragon Saber, Phelios, Dangerous Seed), other games merely use this as a halfhearted effort to shroud more finical matters (i.e. spots where it is almost or factually impossible not to get hit). Some games work with just one life and an energy bar (Macross: Scrambled Valkyrie), others don't (Barunba, Deep Blue). I don't mind any sort of game for as long as it is well thought out.

[Stevens]

1 hit kill is fine, but I do like option 4 which Valkyrius uses to an degree.

You have a shield, if you get hit it drops for 15 seconds, get hit while it is recharging and you die. It works really well here.

Also fuck the stage 4 boss and his RNG lightning attack.

[Captain]

What do you guys think is better?

For weaker or stronger enemy attacks to do more damage (and potentially instakill)?

On one hand, punishing players for stupid mistakes, on the other, making sure hard stuff is hard.

Perhaps this relates to whether the game focuses on bosses or levels?

[Noid]

I prefer the systems where a hit is a death, and you have set lives, with the ability to earn more. Caladrius Blaze is a fine example of my preferred health/lives system.

[emphatic]

I like the shields in Super Space Invaders '91/Majestic 12, but that's it.

[Smokey]

I'm a plain piece of crap so I only like option 2, since it's the closest to the standard 1 hit kill multiple lives formula. I sorta like how TWAIN handled it, where your lives and bombs shared the same energy, with getting hit taking away a lot more.

I may be lacking proper reading comprehension, but aren't the 1st and 3rd option basically the same thing?

[S_Fang]

Health bars that act like lives in STGs like Guwange and 194X series, but extensions or means to recover the lost health is warmly welcome.
I'd choose the "Health and lives for nasty hard games", because we need to crank up the hardships even more to the point on relying on the infamous health bar (a sort of really bad ass version of Star Fox).

[Lobinden]

I much prefer it when you die in one hit in shmups but I don't mind health systems when they're done right. I have no real preference towards any single one of the options on the poll.

I think Danmaku Unlimited 2's health system is fairly interesting, You die in one hit technically but you have a certain amount of shield layers determined by the player before starting the game. When you are hit the shields go to zero for a short time (so if you get hit again in this short time you will die even if you had shield layers remaining, although admittedly when you get hit it cancels all bullets so the chances of this happening are next to zero), and then regenerate to a lower amount. You have no bombs and extends, which makes it feel balanced. The only defensive ability you have is a trance mode where if you get hit during it it will just cancel the trance early.

[Ikazu-san]

Eh, any kinda health system is ok, as long as player is encouraged/required to go for no miss.
I'd use either option 2(no lives) or life tokens things(most attacks do 100 damage, but there's exceptions).

[Doctor Butler]

I like Akai Katana's lifebar system.

Everything kills you in one hit, except lasers, lightning and fire, which kill you fairly quickly.

[Captain]

I may be lacking proper reading comprehension, but aren't the 1st and 3rd option basically the same thing?

One is health that only works for some attacks.

The other is a more forgiving variant that is justified.

[juonryu2nd]

I like the Suguri healthbar best, since Heat is basically a risk-and-reward system.

[mamboFoxtrot]

Any health system is fine as long as it doesn't make the game a joke, or get used as an excuse to not balance the game. However, I do prefer the games like DeathSmiles where you don't have to look at your health bar after getting hit to know how much damage something does, as everything either just does 1 or 2 damage. I haven't yet made sense of how Guwange's system works...

In games where everything just does 1 life of damage, I do prefer the games where you only die/explode on your last life. Exploding and then reappearing on screen is just aesthetically kinda silly unless you're specifically stated to be playing a fleet of identical ships.
PS: Speaking of ESPGaluda II... your death animation is not nearly explody enough! You just blip out of existence like someone turned the TV off on you wtf is that bullshit!?

I like Akai Katana's lifebar system.

Everything kills you in one hit, except lasers, lightning and fire, which kill you fairly quickly.

When was there fire or lightning attacks in Akai Katana?

[BareKnuckleRoo]

Death in one hit shmups, with limited exceptions (Deathsmiles, Akai Katana), seem to work best. The strict penalty for deaths forces developers to actually put thought into the game and its attacks, because the moment they design something that's too difficult and undodgeable, it's immediately recognized and fixed by good devs. Akai Katana's lasers are actually used in score attacking due to the green meter replenish effect they have and split second invulnerability to bullets you get when hit, so you can purposefully get burned by lasers for scoring and survival purposes!

Too many life bar shmups with replenishing health have areas with sloppy design where the expectation is you're going to sponge up bullets, and it's not about actually dodging so much as it is about mitigating the amount/rate of damage as well as buying shiny upgrades, etc.

Strict penalties for being hit work in shmups because they force the developer to polish the dodging to match the precision required, lest the game be regarded as trash.

[Captain]

While it is true that many games with health use it to justify bad design, this is not the kind of game we're discussing here.

The question is more like "In a properly designed game with health, which system would you prefer?"

Also I'm kinda sad that my own idea got no votes. Oh well.

[Squire Grooktook]

Strict penalties for being hit work in shmups because they force the developer to polish the dodging to match the precision required, lest the game be regarded as trash.

This is like saying "don't make an fps, because fps developers tend to make call of duty clones".

Whether developers have frequently implemented the mechanic in a poor or haphazard way does not reflect on the potential of the mechanic itself.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

Whether developers have always implemented the mechanic in a poor or haphazard way

Fixed that for you.

The only good lifebar shmups are ones I can think of are ones where it does not function at all like a traditional bullet sponge lifebar (DS, Guwange, AK). Games like Raptor, Tyrian 2000, Starfighter, etc, all would have played better if they didn't have lifebars to make up for their less than precise gameplay, and relatively enormous hitboxes.

In regards to the poll itself, I'd probably be most fond of #1. A recharging shield that protects you from one hit (so the occasional mistake won't kill you) reminds me a lot of say ChoRenSha68k. You can can easily get additional shield recharges there too, so getting hit with a shield up feels pretty minor, but hit twice in a row and it's quite disastrous.

The last idea in the poll is interesting... it reminded me a lot of Marisa C's bomb in Subterranean Animism where you activate a shield that absorbs a hit, but if you survive the duration of the shield you get half your spent energy back, so you can use it to give a measure of security for attacks you can clear, just not 100% reliably.

It didn't work though, mostly it was given to Marisa C who was kind of a meh shot type, and it doesn't function quite as well as conventional damage bombs which can simply end attacks on use. None of the Bombs in SA were really amazing though, in my opinion.

[Squire Grooktook]

You say always...but you just named 3 shmups that did it right lol.

Arguably you could also throw in SDOJ's 360 mode, since that seems to be fairly well regarded by most players. Elemental Master (though you could arguably call that a live system, like the ESP series), and Macross Scrambled Valkyrie too.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

DS, Guwange and AK feel less like healthbar games and more like lives with chipping damage when you get hit by non-bullet attacks (or in Guwange's case when you have your Shikigami out)... but maybe that's semantics?

I actually completely forgot about SDOJ's 360 Mode. Yes, that is an awesome use of a health system, especially since it motivated you to spend your health for the sake of score. I'll give you that. Also, I guess there was also Astebreed which worked pretty well too. But that still feels like a tiny handful of games compared to the reeking pile of garbage healthbar shmups out there with massive hitboxes. If there's more out there to prove me wrong and that things like recharging health meters can be done well in shmups, then that's fine by me!

[Squire Grooktook]

Oh I'm not arguing that the majority of uses of it are bad, just that the idea isn't inherently bad itself. That a bunch of euroshmup devs who don't understand shmups in general have messed up the concept shouldn't stop aspiring new devs who actually understand the genre from experimenting with seldom used ideas.