BryanM wrote: ↑Sat Jul 22, 2023 12:10 pm
I think about this often. Three stages tied together for a ten minute play session (the optimal maximum length of time someone can focus). Every credit gives you a spin on a gacha to unlock new characters. Etc.
The big problem is it'd be absolutely massive to make, the equivalent of many games. The rhythm games have it so easy; ONGEKI really only has unique art assets for its characters. The boss guys in the background get recycled. The only cost involved in making a new stage is laying down the notes and buying the license of a song. Ridiculously cheap and easy.
Honestly? Depending on the game, it can go as low as 2-3 minutes a pop nowadays. I've seen setups where you're just playing Fruit Ninja on a big touchscreen with a one-minute timer. Most of these barcades also use cards nowadays, so the credit pricing can be flexible as well.
Regardless, though, three shmup stages for three minutes each...that means that with nine stages, all the stages combined add up to about 30 minutes of total content. You could cut corners with the backgrounds by keeping them fairly simple, or reduce the stage count by having B and C layouts for each stage that reuse the backgrounds with different enemy layouts-- maybe depending on what order they show up, like Great Fairy Wars.
...Actually wait, Great Fairy Wars is kind of perfect for this. Why don't we have
that at our arcades instead of a
seventeenth ticket gambling machine?
Squire Grooktook wrote: ↑Sat Jul 29, 2023 3:46 am
Wasn't the "millions of stages that are like full games with their own leaderboards" basically what Darius Burst did with Chronicle Saviors mode. It was easy there because it was all recycled assets and copy/paste. Which is probably fine. Roguelites pretty much are the closest to an arcade-style game revival for normies because they trick you into thinking you're getting new content when really you're basically playing the same single sitting gauntlet every time.
I was thinking of this too. Any developer with games already released could just dip into their library, make a "greatest hits" type of shtick.
Sidenote, but I seriously think an Unconnected Marketeers-style procgen system is kind of the perfect replacement for continues in the modern day. Let players buy randomized wack shit, then penalize their score accordingly. You'd need to keep the shop items from being
too juicy to be missed in proper survival runs... but it's otherwise a highly varied and casual-friendly system with room for imbalanced chaos, whilst getting out of the way of quality stage design for more serious play.
Despatche wrote: ↑Mon Nov 20, 2023 10:36 pm
I understand that what I'm about to say is a personal anecdote, but I have very little actual physical real-life arcade experience. Despite this, when I really sat down to look at arcade games for the first time, which was
not in an actual arcade setting, I
immediately understood what a "1CC" was supposed to be long before I ever saw the term.
My arcade knowledge is probably even more limited than yours, so I can't really argue whether your experience is unusual. But it's definitely clear that at least
some people struggle to "get" arcade games, and I'd have to assume continues as a system don't totally help. I remember seeing an old post from you talking about how they should be thrown out in modern shmups that I resonated a lot with, though I also think they should be replaced with some kind of alternative that fills the same "training wheel" role.
Despatche wrote: ↑Mon Nov 20, 2023 10:36 pmI also don't buy that these mechanics benefit "casual" players (whatever it even means to be "casual") in any meaningful way that triumphs over the clear need to fix a competitive problem.
Rastan's point aside, I think this mindset makes sense
now in an era when casual shmuppers are a lot rarer and new shmups are usually indie. But I'd wager a lot of older games with those kinds of systems had large(r) casual audiences to work with. And...well, casual gamers like having more stuff. Most wouldn't know what the optimal routes are in the first place, and they'd probably care only so much about scoring integrity compared to actually
seeing new stuff in the game. If you're the kind of person that likes collecting 1CCs, or even just someone who occasionally pops open a shmup for a quick half hour of fun? Darius Gaiden is functionally like seven games for you.
I will also put forth that I think multiple routes can add an interesting wrinkle on a community level, in that now players have to figure out
which paths offer what scoring/survival benefits for what reasons. You can compare the scoring potentials of separate "games" that both use the same systems and relative numerical bounds. But in the end, having more ways to engage with a game you already like is really cool, otherwise shmups wouldn't even have scoring systems. So while I won't pretend that a game's content being potentially "obsoleted" in competition doesn't bug me on principle, I tend to agree with Squire that competition shouldn't be the only metric to judge a game, based on general game design intuition.