Blowing the Turret Off the Tank || Design Discussion

[jehu]

Calling all STG historians...

Playing Raiden and old Toaplan games in the past couple weeks, I've been getting curious about the nearly ubiquitous design decision to let the player blow off the turret of enemy tanks - leaving them to drive around firepowerally castrated and 'headless' - before the player finally destroys them for good.

What is the design philosophy motivating this choice?

Best I could come up with is that the 'headless' tanks are functionally harmless, so actually killing them becomes like a micro-overkill mechanic for scoring. But I'm not really satisfied with that thought, so I'd thought I'd ask all of you why this design convention caught on and what it contributes to the gameplay of the genre.

Bonus if you can figure out the first game that featured this mechanic.

[BulletMagnet]

About the best I can come up with is the notion that tanks are supposed to be tougher and take more punishment than other "zako" enemies, so even if you manage to destroy its weaponry it can still move around and more importantly absorb a few additional shots that would be more practically directed at a baddies that can still attack you. Though I'm inclined to imagine that in at least some cases its implementation was intended as more of a visual detail to impress the player.

[Sumez]

Not sure if Flying Shark was the first game to do this, but in games like it and its ilk, almost all of the enemy firepower comes from you not realistically being able to take out all of them immediately, so you constantly gotta focus on where you want to prioritize your own fire.
I think that whole design is actually strangely a bit of a rarely discussed design element, despite it largely applying to almost every shooter - as in, the balance of how much it should take to take down enemies in order for it to still live long enough to pose a threat, yet without making bullet sponge enemies like you'd see in a lot of famous euroshmup examples.

By adding the extra shot to take out the body of a tank in Flying Shark, that gives it a bit of added defensive capabilities, doubling its ability to act as a weak shield for any additional enemies showing up behind it, even when the player ship becomes more powerful.
I think it's quite brilliant, because at the same time you still retain the ability to incapacitate them with a single shot, as you should with popcorn enemies.

On top of that though, it's also an endearing little bit of extra world building that helps making stuff more satisfying to blow up, alongside the little explosion crater sprites that ground enemies traditionally leave behind.

[dark]

I always thought it was just an easy way to embellish the game, whether it was seen as an enhanced graphical detail, or world immersion, if your game did it and another game didn't, it would be just one more detail to set your game apart and impress the player. I'm sure that many of the shmup developers were playing each others games either for fun or market research, so that's why it probably quickly became the standard feature to include.

Eventually it wasn't just tanks, other more advanced enemies such as in Cave games or Battle Gareggga (I think?), would let you blow off side guns or otherwise show visible damage and gradual disablement of non-tank enemies, even certain flying enemies, as a further progression of this "let's impress the players" damage feature.

[Verticen]

Not sure if Flying Shark was the first game to do this, but in games like it and its ilk, almost all of the enemy firepower comes from you not realistically being able to take out all of them immediately, so you constantly gotta focus on where you want to prioritize your own fire.
I think that whole design is actually strangely a bit of a rarely discussed design element, despite it largely applying to almost every shooter - as in, the balance of how much it should take to take down enemies in order for it to still live long enough to pose a threat, yet without making bullet sponge enemies like you'd see in a lot of famous euroshmup examples.

By adding the extra shot to take out the body of a tank in Flying Shark, that gives it a bit of added defensive capabilities, doubling its ability to act as a weak shield for any additional enemies showing up behind it, even when the player ship becomes more powerful.
I think it's quite brilliant, because at the same time you still retain the ability to incapacitate them with a single shot, as you should with popcorn enemies.

Twin Hawk really shows this mechanic in action. The game is actually partially balanced around making every shot count, and blowing up the tanks turrets without killing them can be the difference between life or death. Some of the heavy tanks' turrets actually become damaged and shoot less as the tank sustains damage. This is probably one of the best examples of the mechanic being used to impact survival.

Scorewise, it can often be useful for players to be able to make a tank harmless, but killing it at another time to manipulate a chaining or item drop location mechainic in the game. For whatever scoring reason, It may be advantageous for the player for a disabled tank to continue driving to another part of the screen. ygw games often play with this idea; Bakraid has many sections like this.

I always thought it was just an easy way to embellish the game, whether it was seen as an enhanced graphical detail, or world immersion, if your game did it and another game didn't, it would be just one more detail to set your game apart and impress the player. I'm sure that many of the shmup developers were playing each others games either for fun or market research, so that's why it probably quickly became the standard feature to include.

That's the other thing, and possibly the origin of the mechanic. The spinning turret and the tank base would need to be separate sprites anyway and might operate independently depending on how the game works, so it was likely programmatically easy enough to remove one but not the other for 1 HP damage loss.

[heli]

The gun is a seperate drawing because it needs rotation.
Once you have seperate things why not blow them up.
Then you see those unused pixels on the body also.
It adds more explosions, what more do you want ?

[jehu]

Thanks for the responses, guys - has been genuinely enlightening. I hadn't considered that the independently rotating turret needed to be its own sprite, so it became any easy element to explode for some visual flair.

I wonder, then, if the mechanic started as a cool spectacle and became pragmatic, or the other way around? Correct me if my dates are off, but I think the first Toaplan game that featured it is Hishouzame ('87), and then Daisenpuu ('89) - and I think its quite consequential to the gameplay of both, though I'd probably agree that it's even more so in the latter. (In K.Tiger, released after Hishouzame in '87, the tanks don't feature this mechanic. It seems like they brought it back specially for Daisenpuu, then - so perhaps this is some loose evidence it returned for practical purposes.)

But as you get into the Cave days, and into more modern STG design, there is not anything like Daisenpuu's firepower limitations - so the utility of the mechanic changed, too. As I think Sumez is suggesting, you have to vary the 'texture' of the incoming enemy waves - don't want to have all the 'zako' just blown away like pixy dust. The two-phase destruction of the tanks make them ever so slightly 'crunchier' when you're killing them. Turns into a game-feel thing, I suppose.

[ATTRACTS]

Because it looked cool? I mean what else do you need?
It added a bit of immersion to the idea of battle and give things a bit more grit instead of just one piece/simple explosions.

[Ed Oscuro]

Broke: The turret explodes off the tank
Woke: Entire tank rolls off the screen like a bowling ball! (Raiden 2)

[chum]

Thought experiment to anyone who has played a decent amount of Hishouzame.
Try imagining the game without this mechanic. Either the enemies would die in 1 or 2 hits instead of this in-between reality of neutralizing them in 1 hit and killing them in 2.
Imagine either of those scenarios earnestly. The game would be very, very different.
So I would not say it merely embellishes the game. It is a legitimately gameplay design decision that you can balance the game around.

[Sumez]

Exactly what Chum said. While a part of the decision might have been as people suggested - it's a second sprite anyway, so might as well do it, and it looks cool. Sure.
But you definitely can't ignore the gameplay implications of it. If it took two shots to incapacitate a tank, they would immediately feel much meatier and make those quick sweeps across the screen much less effective. But if you could just take them out entirely with a single bullet, they would provide much less of a shield for enemies appearing behind them, which would mean you almost never have to stop and focus your fire in specific locations, which is also essential to the game's tactical element.

[heli]

Garegga i dont have to tell you is so cool you blow off the turret and it has a new smaller turret with different ammo.