Developing "Tyrian-like" shmup

[leo150250]

Hi everyone! I'm Leandro, a brazilian game developer and, I have a question for you.

I was thinking about doing a shmup game like "Tyrian" which, in my opinion, it is one of the best shmups ever created, not because it has only few "bullet-hell" moments (which I HATE'em!) but, because of it's progression feeling, buying new guns, new ships, going stage after stage, progressing in its story and, oh how I love the secrets and hiden levels that game has.

I've tried other games of the genre (e.g. R-Type, Raptor, Stargunner and Nebula Fighter) and found little things that resembles Tyrian. I think that the most incredible game mechanic on it is how the ship generator works, balancing weapon, shields & special abilities systems, making the player needing to "control itself" to not get a powerful weapon without a powerful generator to it. And that energy bar going up and down during the game is simply beautiful, in my opinion!

But, I know that Tyrian has it flaws. I remember that some levels feels like they were made "in a rush", having some enemy spawning glitches and, sometimes the game is a mess of bullets flying.

So, before I'm going to make it, I want to hear from you, avid shmup lovers:

What are the pros and cons of Tyrian to you, and what you would want to have on Tyrian?

[Leander]

Hi, I haven't played Tyrian before, but I hear this game takes a lot of inspiration from it: https://store.steampowered.com/app/7102 ... r_Revenge/
Try the demo and see if that scratches the itch.

[leo150250]

Hi, I haven't played Tyrian before, but I hear this game takes a lot of inspiration from it: https://store.steampowered.com/app/7102 ... r_Revenge/
Try the demo and see if that scratches the itch.

I've heard of that one. Although I liked the "heat" system, the enemy lifebars and how the enemy ships show in levels... I must admit that the 8-bit (or chiptune, idk) sounds and music didn't catch me... It lacks something, maybe also too darker or too "retro" (with even the CRT detail in options haha) but, it is a good shot.

[Sumez]

This sounds like a setup

[M.Knight]

To follow up on the Dreadstar mention, I find that its demo does capture the good parts of the Tyrian formula with the access to individual stages, the multiple weapons to buy, the music and visuals, so it's an interesting example to follow if you you need answers to your question. And it doesn't have most of the bad stuff too. I haven't played a lot of Tyrian aside from a bit of OpenTyrian but from what I've seen its bad parts are usually the inertia, the super generous lifebar and shields that make you a bullet sponge, the enemies themselves being bullet sponges, as well as unengaging level-design.

If you want to make a Tyrian-style shmup that's fun to play you should focus on solid movement and shooting controls that are inherently fun (even without any in-game purchase or anything), enemy balance and stage pacing that keeps the players focused. And then you can build stuff on top of that like having many different weapons to buy and experiment with, very different stages and locales, some humor here and there, etc.

Have you checked out Ginga Force by the way? Its Story Mode might be a good example as well if you want a game with a more Tyrian-esque approach to its game design. There's a shop with weapons to buy and stages are divided into missions rather than a full arcade-style run.

[leo150250]

This sounds like a setup

...what?

To follow up on the Dreadstar mention, I find that its demo does capture the good parts of the Tyrian formula with the access to individual stages, the multiple weapons to buy, the music and visuals, so it's an interesting example to follow if you you need answers to your question. And it doesn't have most of the bad stuff too. I haven't played a lot of Tyrian aside from a bit of OpenTyrian but from what I've seen its bad parts are usually the inertia, the super generous lifebar and shields that make you a bullet sponge, the enemies themselves being bullet sponges, as well as unengaging level-design.

If you want to make a Tyrian-style shmup that's fun to play you should focus on solid movement and shooting controls that are inherently fun (even without any in-game purchase or anything), enemy balance and stage pacing that keeps the players focused. And then you can build stuff on top of that like having many different weapons to buy and experiment with, very different stages and locales, some humor here and there, etc.

Have you checked out Ginga Force by the way? Its Story Mode might be a good example as well if you want a game with a more Tyrian-esque approach to its game design. There's a shop with weapons to buy and stages are divided into missions rather than a full arcade-style run.

Hi M.Knight. Indeed, the inertia from Tyrian sometimes causes some frustrations (haha!). I always thought that the shields regen on Tyrian are too fast, considering that sometimes you can simply ignore the bullet coming in your direction.

To bypass this, some suggestions came:

1) For the inertia... The ship doesn't have at it own but, I think that the enemy bullets must have a knockback so, the player ship would be nice to control and, if hit, the player must act to compensate the inertia from the bullets.

2) I was thinking if I could put a meter to the shield regeneration and, while this meter is filling, the player must avoid bullets to fullfill this meter and, once it's full, you'll need energy available to fill just one block of shield. Also, the shields and armor act like Tyrian: With no shields, all hits goes directly to the ship's armor.

3) Enemy balance is a thing I'm really concerned, since I know that after some debugging, the "first level" will be extremely easy FOR ME, but not for others. So I was thinking of making a closed beta before launch, to look forward in controlling this.

About Ginga Force, thank you for the recomendation! For what I've seen from the videos, the weapons are very good looking, and how they are shown in the player's ship is a nice touch. I must confess that, the 3D background is a good idea but, sometimes it can be very confusing, along with the bullet-feast on screen. Also, sometimes the 3D can trick the player to where its bullets will touch the enemy or not. Take a building for example, but the player's ship is flying over it and his bullets, while still on same level than the ship, attack the building "somehow". That's a tolerable mistake when dealing with 2D shmups but, for 3D shmups, things are a bit more complicated, in my opinion.

[dark]

I never liked that the ship in Tyrian had momentum, that it would take a second to get to speed if you pressed a direction, and it would take a moment to gradually stop when you stopped pressing a direction. My preferred movement style is the no momentum style used by basically every Japanese created shmup I can think of.

I like the main concepts of Tyrian that you mentioned, upgrading ships, balancing weapons and lots of levels, story and secrets. Just my opinion but I thought Tyrian had too many cheesy jokes and joke levels. I would have liked a more serious tone.

[leo150250]

I never liked that the ship in Tyrian had momentum, that it would take a second to get to speed if you pressed a direction, and it would take a moment to gradually stop when you stopped pressing a direction. My preferred movement style is the no momentum style used by basically every Japanese created shmup I can think of.

I like the main concepts of Tyrian that you mentioned, upgrading ships, balancing weapons and lots of levels, story and secrets. Just my opinion but I thought Tyrian had too many cheesy jokes and joke levels. I would have liked a more serious tone.

Yes, I agreed: Tyrian's jokes are awful hahahaha

Also, if there's something that I simply can't understand is the fifth episode, present in Tyrian 2000. Not only the graphics design is much different than the original ones but, the story, enemies and bosses are ridiculous. Yes, I don't like to fight a starship that is made of human mouth, nose, eyes, heart and brain, after everything that was on the previous episodes.

And I hate the "food ships" idea. "Super Carrot 9"... What were they thinking!?!?

[leo150250]

I never liked that the ship in Tyrian had momentum, that it would take a second to get to speed if you pressed a direction, and it would take a moment to gradually stop when you stopped pressing a direction. My preferred movement style is the no momentum style used by basically every Japanese created shmup I can think of.

I like the main concepts of Tyrian that you mentioned, upgrading ships, balancing weapons and lots of levels, story and secrets. Just my opinion but I thought Tyrian had too many cheesy jokes and joke levels. I would have liked a more serious tone.

Yes, I agreed: Tyrian's jokes are awful hahahaha

Also, if there's something that I simply can't understand is the fifth episode, present in Tyrian 2000. Not only the graphics design is much different than the original ones but, the story, enemies and bosses are ridiculous. Yes, I don't like to fight a starship that is made of human mouth, nose, eyes, heart and brain, after everything that was on the previous episodes.

And I hate the "food ships" idea. "Super Carrot 9"... What were they thinking!?!?

Whoops, made a small mistake: "Nosedrip's nonsense" is on the final levels of the fourth episode.

But that doesn't diminish how ridiculous is the fifth episode, with all those fruits flying and attacking.

[M.Knight]

-Knockback on enemy bullets : Well, usually when you get hit, you have an invincibility duration (of say, 3-5 seconds or so) to allow you to realize your mistake, recover from the impact and get back in the game's groove. If you don't have any post-damage invincibility, it's easy to lose multiple lives in quick succession and be penalized multiple times for the same mistake which feels very unfair.

This means that even if you get pushed away by bullets, you should not die again from said pushback. However, the idea can be interesting as the sense of physics that this interaction provides can be fun in its own way. Some games make collisions with enemies non-lethal for example, and have them instead push you around a bit, which still encourages you to not touch said enemies, and can potentially kill you if they manage to actually knock you into a bullet. For example, Vasara games, which put a big focus on melee attacks and getting closer to enemies, do that since instantly losing a life upon enemy collision in a melee-heavy game would be pretty frustrating pretty quickly.

As for bullets, I know that Aeon Zenith, a shmup currently in development, features knockback upon hitting a bullet. It still has the post-death invincibility so you don't get chain-damaged but if you want to see an example of bullet damage pushing the player away, I suggest trying out the demo here : viewtopic.php?f=1&t=67440

-Shields : Yeah, I think having one-hit shields that can save you once and then require to be recharged are a good compromise. As long as the recharge takes enough time/skill, it doesn't feel broken but remains a helpful tool for players. Leander's own shmup project also has a similarly working shield item IIRC : viewtopic.php?f=9&t=65740

What you can also do is that instead of recharging over time, the shield recharges as you collect items, destroy enemies or score well. In other words, the player has to play better if he wants to recover his shield faster. I know Flame Zapper Kotsujin (really amazing shmup by the way) has a one-hit shield that gets restored as you collect medals and items, and if you recharge it again while it's still active you get bonus points instead.

Batsugun Special has a one-hit shield too, though I don't remember if the recharge is time-based or score/enemy destruction-based.

The reason it might be interesting to go with player actions rather than time for the recharge is that time is more passive, not optimizable and doesn't push you to do anything more than just survive X seconds. There's also potential for abuse if for example you fight a boss with an easier phase in between and then just stay on that phase without damaging the boss just to recharge the shield, which breaks the pacing (especially if there is no incentive to kill the boss as fast as possible)

And yeah, I agree that the 3D can be confusing at times. Ginga Force's dev's previous game Eschatos has a similar problem except worse because the camera did some perspective changes and stuff. But it is still a pretty fun game. For your own shmup, if you want to stick to 2D and have much clearer hitboxes it's perfectly fine!

[leo150250]

-Knockback on enemy bullets : Well, usually when you get hit, you have an invincibility duration (of say, 3-5 seconds or so) to allow you to realize your mistake, recover from the impact and get back in the game's groove. If you don't have any post-damage invincibility, it's easy to lose multiple lives in quick succession and be penalized multiple times for the same mistake which feels very unfair.

This means that even if you get pushed away by bullets, you should not die again from said pushback. However, the idea can be interesting as the sense of physics that this interaction provides can be fun in its own way. Some games make collisions with enemies non-lethal for example, and have them instead push you around a bit, which still encourages you to not touch said enemies, and can potentially kill you if they manage to actually knock you into a bullet. For example, Vasara games, which put a big focus on melee attacks and getting closer to enemies, do that since instantly losing a life upon enemy collision in a melee-heavy game would be pretty frustrating pretty quickly.

As for bullets, I know that Aeon Zenith, a shmup currently in development, features knockback upon hitting a bullet. It still has the post-death invincibility so you don't get chain-damaged but if you want to see an example of bullet damage pushing the player away, I suggest trying out the demo here : viewtopic.php?f=1&t=67440

-Shields : Yeah, I think having one-hit shields that can save you once and then require to be recharged are a good compromise. As long as the recharge takes enough time/skill, it doesn't feel broken but remains a helpful tool for players. Leander's own shmup project also has a similarly working shield item IIRC : viewtopic.php?f=9&t=65740

What you can also do is that instead of recharging over time, the shield recharges as you collect items, destroy enemies or score well. In other words, the player has to play better if he wants to recover his shield faster. I know Flame Zapper Kotsujin (really amazing shmup by the way) has a one-hit shield that gets restored as you collect medals and items, and if you recharge it again while it's still active you get bonus points instead.

Batsugun Special has a one-hit shield too, though I don't remember if the recharge is time-based or score/enemy destruction-based.

The reason it might be interesting to go with player actions rather than time for the recharge is that time is more passive, not optimizable and doesn't push you to do anything more than just survive X seconds. There's also potential for abuse if for example you fight a boss with an easier phase in between and then just stay on that phase without damaging the boss just to recharge the shield, which breaks the pacing (especially if there is no incentive to kill the boss as fast as possible)

And yeah, I agree that the 3D can be confusing at times. Ginga Force's dev's previous game Eschatos has a similar problem except worse because the camera did some perspective changes and stuff. But it is still a pretty fun game. For your own shmup, if you want to stick to 2D and have much clearer hitboxes it's perfectly fine!

One-hit shield is a good idea, but since I want enemy knockback and player's finese to move through the level, I'm really concerned if the knockback pushes the player on another bullet, causing him to die so, I think that using the same shield/armor system from Tyrian is good, although it has the shield recharge.

I'm thinking that I could change the shield recharge system like if its connected to "power cells": A shield system conected to more power cells can recharge shields faster (but never too fast than Tyrian haha). More cells means that the player needs more money to buy these powercells and, if he doesn't have enough dedicated powercells, the same power cells that's connected to other systems like front weapon, rear weapon and movement will need to connect also to shields, making the player be cautious to determine WHEN fire or WHEN move.

Also, maybe... the ability to make a "power redirection" during the level, to "power up shields" or "make fast movements" at demand...?

[M.Knight]

Good point about the shield hit knocking you back on a bullet, but it can be fixed too. There are several possibilities :
-The shield remains active when getting knocked back by an enemy instead of disappearing. Only hitting a bullet will destroy it
-The shield has the unique property of not knocking you back when you collide with an enemy with it active. The contact damage may destroy the enemy and disable the shield though, so you can't abuse it to ram into everything
-It's also possible that instead of seeing it as a problem, it's actually on purpose and it's an additional source of mayhem and tension, as even getting a shield won't guarantee that you can safely touch an enemy

I am not sure exactly how the power cell mechanic would work exactly, so maybe some prototyping can be useful, but I get the feeling this mechanic is more based on the ship's engineering rather than the game loop itself. Maybe I didn't understand it correctly, but while the upgrades to shield recharge speed seem fine, the whole "power redirection" idea sounds more "realistic" than actually fun. Moving and shooting are things you will always want to do in a shmup so encouraging the player not to do that (and basically not interact with the game) just so they can recharge their shield faster doesn't sound like a good time.

That said, temporarily foregoing your offense in order to charge something is still pretty interesting and you can see it in multiple shmups. Charge attacks à la R-Type or Vasara where you have to hold the button and don't shoot anything while you prepare your powerful attack are fun. The difference is that the cycle of tension and release is shorter (I assume the shield won't recharge when not shooting as fast as it takes to fire a charged attack in those other shmups because it would be kinda broken otherwise) and that the actual release is a powerful attack. Simply recharging the shield here may not be as exciting.

The idea of power redirection is an interesting one. One application I can think of is that the shield's power can be redirected and sacrificed in order to get a temporary power boost (i.e an hyper) which may also be better for score/getting currency or something. In other words, once the player has a shield, he could choose to consume it and give up on its defensive power (until it manages to recharge it again) to get more offense instead.

[Ixmucane2]

One important aspect of Tyrian that can be improved upon is weapon variety: there are many, including rare and strange ones, but most of them are just not good enough and therefore never used in practice. Even worse, it doesn't make sense to leave behind a good weapon in a certain level's store to try out a new or exotic one.
It would be better to reduce the number of weapons, make them more easily available (e.g. stores could offer some predefined common or rare weapons plus all or most of the previously used ones) and above all make every one useful:

• for a predetermined niche, e.g. low damage but fast and dense forward bullet streams to cut through dense bullet patterns
• on some type of Pareto frontier, e.g. armor-piercing bonuses vs. higher damage against less protected targets or higher damage vs. lower power consumption
• with simple variations, e.g. wider or narrower firing cones

Tyrian allows five weapons (front, rear, two sidekicks, special); by limiting them with power requirements, even more weapons (or also multiple shields) can be combined with two to four buttons increasing flexibility and eroding the need to have the single best weapons at the maximum level.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

The Good:

• Tyrian 2000 has a TON of content. Secret levels, a massive selection of weapons to play with, a huge number of game modes. It's difficult to actually see everything in the game, there's so much stuff! It's truly a labour of love.

• Weapon and ship customization. Being able to play with a variety of loadouts and unlock new weapons is really fun. There's a lot to experiment with, and a lot of the weapons are pretty viable!

• Graphics and music are really well done. Weapon and enemy sprites, explosions, and so on are all really exciting.

The "Interesting But Not Executed Well" Stuff:

• The twiddle, where you can input buttons do do special command attacks. Neat idea in theory, but I would like special command attacks to require using a special button to trigger them, such as Up Down Up Special sort of thing. The problem with their use being tied to the main firing button is you easily can trigger some of them by attack, such as the repair one that immediately drains all your shields to refill some armour. And I don't like unintentionally triggering them by accident if it costs me a valuable resource (shields) when it's easy to do so.

Twiddles would have been cooler if a) they used a dedicated special button so you couldn't use them by accident, or b) they didn't drain your shields, and instead worked on a cooldown timer, so accidental activations wouldn't jeopardize you.

The Bad:

• The hitbox is approximately the size of a whale. It's absolutely massive, and is bigger than the ship sprite.

• Inertia. Inertia sucks. It especially sucks when taking damage causes you to bounce around at times like you're a pinball, and when your massive hitbox size makes it easy to be bounced around.

• The healthbars suck. Specifically, by using a healthbar system, the designers thought that they needed a massive hitbox to balance the game, so instead of exciting dodges you run into a system where you're more just managing how many hits you take and planning on running through bullets to mitigate damage, rather than focusing on evading them altogether. Healthbars also lead to sloppier design, because designers don't focus on making sure everything is actually dodgeable.

• The darkness gimmick sucks. It's way overused on the hardest difficulty where many levels that normally don't use it now have the darkness gimmick. Those sorts of gimmicks should be used very, very sparingly, far more than Tyrian 2000 chose to.

• I'm not fond of the generator system. I'm not crazy about systems where your main weapon has limited ammo. It's really annoying having to plan around making sure you have enough juice that you don't constantly run out of ammo due to a poor generator. There's other ways to make balanced custom weapon games that are more enjoyable, where all the weapons try to be usable. What generator you have eventually becomes meaningless anyways late game where your generator is strong enough to fuel pretty much any weapon loadout. Ginga Force uses something similar, but it's not as troublesome because enemies constantly seem to give out ammo refills. I see other people have mentioned Ginga Force, and I agree with them that it'd be a good way to get inspiration on a modern example of a game with customizable loadouts.

My recommendations to make something similar to Tyrian while fixing some of what Tyrian breaks:

Don't use lifebars. Lives + a shield that can take a fixed # of hits, where each shield segment recharges over time would be better so you can make the hitbox smaller and allow tighter dodging while still having a forgiving shield mechanic in place so you only lose a life if you get hit twice within 15 seconds or however long it takes to recharge. Rolling Gunner Overpower uses this system and it works well. You could even use each shield segment as a charge for a twiddle attack, turning it into a risk vs reward element.

As a side note, I used to love Raptor and Tyrian 2000 as classic MS-DOS games. And then my tastes changed and developed as I played more shmups, particularly arcade shmups. They're decent games, but they're flawed in many ways, and a product mostly of tastes of that era. Something like Major Stryker, while less visually impressive, feels more truly arcadey in terms of how it handles. I never got into Stargunner, mostly cause I felt it had enemy bullet visibility issues (I was always getting hit by grey shrapnel from enemies without really feeling like I saw what hit me).

Currently, I am of the opinion that SideLine, a little known game from Taiwan, is the best MS-DOS shmup ever made. By an absolutely massive margin. It blows Raptor as well as Tyrian clean out of the water in terms of how it plays and handles, and could have easily gotten a true arcade release, that's how good it is. Specifically:

• Relatively small hitbox size. The game is still difficult, but extremely fair, and it is exciting to squeeze through tight bullets.

• No inertia. Inertia is one of the biggest complaints I have with Tyrian 2000.

• No lifebars. Attacks all do the same damage to your 3-hit shield, including collisions with objects. This leads to better design, since everything becomes realistically dodgeable instead of designing attacks where you have to soak and manage damage.

• Fun weapon and subweapon variety to use.

• Full 2 player mode. This is very uncommon in an MS-DOS shmup.

• Amazing music and graphics.

As a fan of MS-DOS shmups I'd highly recommend checking it out. My ideal dream game would be something with the sheer content of Tyrian 2000 including a variety of customizable weapon loadouts, with the tighter arcade-style handling of SideLine.

[leo150250]

Sorry for the late response, I've been busy with "adulthood obligations"

I think that charged attacks are a really good mechanic, to use a powerful weapon while teaching the player to get the timing of firing it to use its maximum power. Nice suggestion! And, you guessed right, M.Knight. We're thinking to make that the whole concept of the power redirection is something that could be managed during the level (maybe using some bullet-time to help the player to make fast redirections). It could be used to temporarly redirect the ship's generators to specific systems, allowing the player to bypass some difficult (but not impossible!) situations in unusual manners.

One important aspect of Tyrian that can be improved upon is weapon variety: there are many, including rare and strange ones, but most of them are just not good enough and therefore never used in practice. Even worse, it doesn't make sense to leave behind a good weapon in a certain level's store to try out a new or exotic one.
It would be better to reduce the number of weapons, make them more easily available (e.g. stores could offer some predefined common or rare weapons plus all or most of the previously used ones) and above all make every one useful:

• for a predetermined niche, e.g. low damage but fast and dense forward bullet streams to cut through dense bullet patterns
• on some type of Pareto frontier, e.g. armor-piercing bonuses vs. higher damage against less protected targets or higher damage vs. lower power consumption
• with simple variations, e.g. wider or narrower firing cones

Tyrian allows five weapons (front, rear, two sidekicks, special); by limiting them with power requirements, even more weapons (or also multiple shields) can be combined with two to four buttons increasing flexibility and eroding the need to have the single best weapons at the maximum level.

Really, the overload of weapons in Tyrian is disconcerning hahah

e.g. I particularly love the Proton Cannon as Front and Rear Weapons, but the initial level of the Proton Cannon forces me to not use it on the first level. The problem that shows up (for me, at least) is that the Proton Cannon is available only a few levels later, and I must use other weapons during this. One or another secret weapon is nice in certain levels so, this have come to me an idea:

Why not use an "open-world" level system? Like, following a "questline" to unlock some levels, getting some "data cubes" to discover another ones and even some special weapons in certain planets or space-stations, allowing the player to make some backtracking to get a specific ship or weapon. Would it work, what do you think?

BareKnuckleRoo, I know that trying to create a game which, in this case, is to be "inspired by" a well-known game like Tyrian is a HUGE challenge that has HUGE chances of floping away (haha)! I've found a site on internet containing all the Data Cubes's text from Tyrian and, only in it you can notice how massive is the game lore: http://members.iinet.net.au/~vannevar/t ... cript.html
Also, Alexander Brandon made a brillant job in Tyrian's OST that spawns a lot of remakes/remixes. I myself have done a remake of the "Tyrian Level" music using orchestra plugins, back in 2015: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRr9_0AaZoM

The twiddles I would like to implement as a technique but, I'm taking your notes about the special key and the cooldown timer suggested, to make the player know WHEN is the right time to use it.
I'll try to stick to the lifebar system with no lives, although I know that it can be frustrating to reach the level's boss, dying at the very beginning of the battle and, in advance, needing to pass the whole level again to take down the boss... But I will take notes also about the cons of the lifebar system!

Also, what a real discover, I didn't knew about SideLine! Thank you for the suggestion!

[leo150250]

Hello, everyone.

I've made the first TEASER video of my game, which will be called "Beyond the Storm". Check it out here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7AoC67hhjM
Also, if you want to join the closed-alpha program, just go at my website: http://leandrogabriel.net and click on the "popup" that will show!

I'm looking forward in this topic for more ideas/feedback about Tyrian, which is our prime-inspiration for making "Beyond the Storm"!

[leo150250]

I've made a new topic focused on the development of the actual game (with screenshots and other things), called "Beyond the Storm": viewtopic.php?f=9&t=67639