Intro guide to Shmups?

[Codiene]

Has anyone ever put together a guide to shmups featuring the arcade hardware, The developers, the games etc? I'm getting back into the games now and have therefore been doing a lot of reading and was thinking about collecting everything together into a pdf book as a start. A lot of it will be collecting and crediting other peoples content admittedly but it'll help me keep tabs on the games, developers and system and it might be a good resource for others. I'll be concentrating on vertical shooters for the start, just because it is where my focus is now.

I quickly roughed out a layout and dropped some stuff in to get an idea of how it might look.

It'd be great to get the players perspective from more knowledgeable players here, I've alrady dropped some of Bulletmagnets text for racket boy into this one.

Not everything is credited yet (images and the technical text, that is not intentional this is just a 'rough' idea for the moment.



EDIT: and if anyone has any feedback, even if it is "don't bother with it" then do let me know

[XtraSmiley]

I can't contribute, because I suck at them still, but this is a great idea!

I'd love to get a nice printed version to have near my machines to flip through as well!

[FRO]

Very cool idea! Not sure what I could contribute, but I fully support this concept, and would be interested in seeing the progress.

[Sumez]

I can't speak for the quality (it's HG101, so there's definitely both positives and negatives to that), but this exists: http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/books/ ... ups-vol-1/

I really like your mock-up for what it's worth!

[Gamer707b]

Im liking what you got going so far. I say go for it!!

[Codiene]

Thanks for the feedback guys. The HCG101 book looks interesting never seen that before. It’s slightly different to what I was thinking of doing so I might just persevere with it for a bit at least I have been working on some other templates will share them when I have them looking neater.

I did a quick check on what it might cost if hard copies were ever wanted. Hard copies of the large square format with cover sleeves and assuming it is circa 400 pages would be a lot more expensive than I had ever imagined. Admittedly from only a quick bit of research a short run of 100 they would be circa £65-70.

Might need to look at setting it out in a more traditional A size format, unfortunately, if it was to be set up for printing. I’ll do some more research to ensure the layout can be printed in a more cost effective manner.

And just to be clear I wouldn’t be looking to make money out of this so that is the cost price with nothing added so shipping would be on top of that.