Vostok 2061

[qmish]

Seems to be an eye-candy "euroshmup".

Noticed some posts from developer on various subreddits about it.
With talks about how it's his first game and how backgrounds are drawn with Zbrush.
Also main inspiration could be Raptor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2X_guJXfWg

Game and soundtrack of it now released in Steam.

[m.sniffles.esq]

Very, very, VERY purrtee.

Okay, so if everyone kinda, sorta dislikes euroshmups (myself included) why do people keeps making like incredibly unabashed euroshmups??

Not trying to start a thing, it's just something that genuinely confounds me. I mean, is it still tied to locality? Because it seems to me folks in Europe seem to love Japanese-style shooters and hate their own...

[SavagePencil]

I think it comes out of need rather than initial vision. You have cool ship designs all drawn up and working in game and it won’t come together like a Raiden or whatever so in comes the health bar. Aesthetics need to come after you’ve proven out the design.

[qmish]

Yeah this is what you get when artist makes the whole game. Ideally, you need "gameplay director" to help you out, but that's not the case in hobby projects like that.
He was saying something like... that it took him 5 years to make this (e.g. during free evenings after work), and most of that time spent was on "making a game in unity while being not a programmer".

Personally I can understand the guy... i'm also someone who can't code but can do some 2d or else. So if I were making a STG, perhaps it would be similar.

But... the author of subject even admits he doesnt play the shmup gentre, lol.
Like, "hey i played Raptor and Tyrian in childhood, and 15 years later i decided it cool to make a game and guess what? i think shmups are easy enough for first project, lets go!"


So that kinda makes me feel very weird. On one hand you have game like this, where author doesnt even care about shmups (he is good artist and musician though, okay) and posts about his game take, like, 100-200 comments on gamedev subreddits.

And then you have stuff like Gunvein, which is only known by hardcore genre enthusiasts, which flies under radar of most gamers and dicussions "in outer world", but thats a game that is clearly made by passionate fans of genre.

This is like two worlds...

[sunnshiner]

Very, very, VERY purrtee.

Okay, so if everyone kinda, sorta dislikes euroshmups (myself included) why do people keeps making like incredibly unabashed euroshmups??

Not trying to start a thing, it's just something that genuinely confounds me. I mean, is it still tied to locality? Because it seems to me folks in Europe seem to love Japanese-style shooters and hate their own...

They're just ever so slightly wrong in lots of different ways, aren't they? And all of the little wrongnesses add up making a bit of a polished turd of a game;

inertia + high res graphics + weedy bullets + spongey enemies + health bar = badly-drawn Disney character on the side of an ice cream van. You know what it's supposed to be, but it's just not quite right...

[qmish]

It returns us to evergreen dilemma about "making shmups mainstream".

Was reading through once again topic on it
https://old.reddit.com/r/shmups/comment ... ainstream/

I really agree that shmups have stuck way too close to the arcade experience and refuse to evolve. I think there's room for people who enjoy the arcade experience, but I'd like to see what can be done with a shmup if we completely remove the arcade experience.

There's a few that break the arcade mold, drifting lands, jets n guns, counter attack, skyforce reloaded.
But none are the "killer app" of shmups. They're all missing something, and not all the same something.

***

Yeah but souls games reward you with levels, gear, lore, secrets. Most shmups are pretty static outside of powering up your shot and collecting bombs. The rewards in a souls game are cumulative, while as in a shmup they're temporary. Maybe we need something entirely new.

Exactly, and shmups don't do that, they don't have rewards at all aside from occasionally ship unlocks.
I disagree with shot upgrades being rewards, IMO they're tools the player needs, and in most cases are stripped of if they make a mistake and die.

Angerforce and skyforce give you tons of permanent, rpg-like awards and I wouldn't classify them as anything other than shmups.

***

How many folks truly care about high score? Shit I love the genre and I rarely if ever give a shit, I'm too focused on merely surviving. Some syst where risk/reward and blasting as many enemies as possible provides payoff in the form of money or some other means to "level up" would provide more substance and replay value outside of just mindless shooting, certainly for folks who have little interest in scores

***

I have to agree that a progression system is the way to bring it to the masses. Rogue like games have been huge lately and if you boil those all the way down they are insanely difficult games that slowly get easier the more you play them because you as a player get better and it unlocks more and more powerful upgrades to help you along the way. Shmups lack that progression. They are a, get good or move on kind of relationship. Most, unfortunately, move on.

The other issue is the learning curve. I'm not going to say it's fighting game level hard of a curve, but there really isn't a whole lot of games that train you for the shmup gameplay. A lot of the people I talk to about the genre say something along the lines of "I'm not very good at those types of games" so they just don't play them. Once you get the learning curve, they are immensely fun, but it's a hard ask to have people who didn't grow up with insanely difficult games to put in the time to get the rewards of the genre.

***

Oh, this one is great:

Traditional shmup/bullet-hell design is too linear for modern gamers (arcade design). The content is narrow and vertically stacked. The original designs came from environments where the player's money was on the line, and where their gameplay could be publicly displayed. Playing alone with infinite credits just doesn't produce the same tension and reward.

The arcade formula is evolved in modern games by reducing the difficulty/complexity (casual phone games), breaking up the experience into shorter bursts (rhythm games, challenge platformers), providing infinite novelty (rougelikes), and providing mechanics for cumulative progress between sessions.

Shmups also have the problem of being "short" in terms of content. Gamers tend to look for a certain playtime per dollar, and most shmups can be run through very quickly. Consider bullet hells from a developer like CAVE- they require a huge amount of active focus on an extremely narrow path- there is no luck involved, and no randomness- you must conform to the game. This is very claustrophobic by modern standards.

In rhythm games the music attracts casuals, and the challenges are neatly tiered into short bursts of entertainment. It is a horizontal selection of content- get frustrated on one piece, and just try another. It's more open ended in approach.

Roguelike elements seem to be a solution, but part of the reason shmups work is due to manually designed patterns and encounters. I don't think it can really be modernized as a standalone genre- it is niche by design. The general aesthetics of the genre tend to be more abstract and special-interest. Games like Undertale and Nier Automata successfully fused shmup gameplay into more current themes, but those games succeeded on more than their bullet hell sequences.

So to conclude this waterfall of text, I'd say shmup is a distinctly retro game genre at odds with the expectations of modern audiences. The developers that could bring fresh themes to the genre either incorporate shmup gameplay as a sub-component to a larger framework, or evolve it to the point it becomes labeled as something else entirely.

[Necronom]

Since nobody here seems to have actually played it, I'll just share my impressions after 2 hours playtime.

Yes, the controls are floaty, inertia based. I can totally see them work in a top down tank game but here, not the best choice.
The presentation is actually really nice, especially since this is a one man job. Backgrounds and ship designs are very cool.
The difficulty can be all over the place and enemy placement is hit and miss - the second stage was ridiculously difficult while the third was a cake walk...again one man job and it's his very first game.
What's interesting is the load out mechanic where you buy weapons AND ammunition with the points you earned in the last level. Deciding how much of each ammunition you take into the next stage is kinda original imo - do you spend evenly or invest the most into the powerful stuff for certain situations while you use the peashooter for the rest. I found it ultimately unbalanced but fun.
I think there's a lot of potential here and truly hope that the dev stays in the shmup or at least action genre with his next project.

And now for something completely different...

Very, very, VERY purrtee.

Okay, so if everyone kinda, sorta dislikes euroshmups (myself included) why do people keeps making like incredibly unabashed euroshmups??

Not trying to start a thing, it's just something that genuinely confounds me. I mean, is it still tied to locality? Because it seems to me folks in Europe seem to love Japanese-style shooters and hate their own...

European and UK devs have released many distinctly non-Japanese and still successful shmups since the freaking 80s until today (Armalyte, Uridium, Sturmwind, Resogun etc.). Saying that folks in Europe hate their own is ridiculous.
I really don't get why some people keep using the term "Euroshmup" when it's so obvious that what they mean are badly balanced shmups made by inexperienced WESTERN devs. Those devs happen to be mostly EU or UK based because you know...ain't that much US shmups out there

[qmish]

Yes, the controls are floaty, inertia based.

I've just found this weird answer from developer:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/1463830/ ... 585828465/

It depends on what you are using to control the player. If you use the keyboard, then yes, there is inertia. If you use a controller, then there is no inertia. I hope it helps:)

I think there's a lot of potential here and truly hope that the dev stays in the shmup or at least action genre with his next project.

Sadly they said in one of reddit posts that they don't even play the genre, just have sweet memories of Raptor from 90s.
On the other hand, they were thinking of moving to UE5 to put better use of their Zbrush sculpting talent. As their backgrounds have, like, 50 million polygons, so they had to pre-render them here in game.

Obviously this developer is an artist, and ideally such person could work together with someone else to be a game designer and programmer to make a project where strong sides of each are used.
But life doesnt work like that often.

Then again, congrats to dev for not abandoning project, and succeeding with task of making his own first game.

I really don't get why some people keep using the term "Euroshmup" when it's so obvious that what they mean are badly balanced shmups made by inexperienced WESTERN devs. Those devs happen to be mostly EU or UK based because you know...ain't that much US shmups out there

I'd disagree. Euroshmup, in my eyes, really exists as specific subgenre or, if you want to say it otherwise, "school" or "tradition" which encompasses plenty of things in games that belong to it.

And yes, there IS fanbase for it. It's just harder to people like us to "get it" when we are allured to something different and/or specific and "can't go back".
It's just like I can't go back much to Mortal Kombat series after I tasted SNK fightings (this example might be not accurate, sorry)

[Bassa-Bassa]

I really don't get why some people keep using the term "Euroshmup" when it's so obvious that what they mean are badly balanced shmups made by inexperienced WESTERN devs. Those devs happen to be mostly EU or UK based because you know...ain't that much US shmups out there

It's not just "balance" - shit like inertia, overabundant tank enemies/underpowered ship, ship customization, unorthodox stage structure, too long stages, etc, etc. All these features have their origin in Europe and was a essentially a Europe thing by those thinking they could improve the Japanese formula. See it this way - European stuff free of that shit isn't called "euroshmup". Just "badly balanced" Japanese stuff isn't either.


Ed. If your point is that the term could just be "westshmup" instead, I can agree, though.

[sunnshiner]

It's just like I can't go back much to Mortal Kombat series after I tasted SNK fightings (this example might be not accurate, sorry)

No, I'd agree that's a decent analogy. While MK is not in any sense 'real', one of its original selling points was its graphics (and the fatalities, obvs) and the sense of 'reality' they gave BITD. Maybe this is part of the euroshmup problem? Any nod to 'reality' in a game gives a sort of uncanny valley kind of feeling- either go all in and make it a sim* or fuck the physics and resource management nonsense off and make it fun.

* maybe why the block button works in Virtua Fighter and other 3D fighters but not in Mortal Kombat? Full disclosure, I fucking hate MK. It's a total fun-sponge of a series- it was developed in the west, is that right? That'd explain a lot

[qmish]

I'd say that I still find UMK3 fun, though. But i'm biased as it was among the very first games i ever played
Then again, people still play tournaments in it.

I can't stand modern MK though.

[-Fish-]

Would be interesting to see this dev intregrated with a larger shmup team just to handle the art.

[bcass]

Some of those background designs are undeniably gorgeous. Would love to see something like that in a proper STG.

[To Far Away Times]

Yes, the controls are floaty, inertia based.

I've just found this weird answer from developer:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/1463830/ ... 585828465/

It depends on what you are using to control the player. If you use the keyboard, then yes, there is inertia. If you use a controller, then there is no inertia. I hope it helps:)

This is like a new de evolution in euroshmups. Game design, what's that?

[qmish]

In this case, perhaps really just a certain lack of experience and/or knowledge.

Maybe it just didn't really occured to them that there are recommendations, rules, nice examples etc. etc.
So they were doing it just "by feeling".

[Jeneki]

It depends on what you are using to control the player. If you use the keyboard, then yes, there is inertia. If you use a controller, then there is no inertia. I hope it helps:)

This reminds me of Soldner-X on ps3. If you used the D-Pad to move, the inputs were delayed and took more time to stop after release. But if you used the analog stick it was more responsive. Very strange way of designing control.

[Angry Hina]

Games like Undertale and Nier Automata successfully fused shmup gameplay into more current themes, but those games succeeded on more than their bullet hell sequences.

On more than their bullet hell sequence? Has the author played them? In Nier Automata, they are just a complete joke and evolve nearly not after the little intro sequence. After completing the game, these sequences felt like nothing more but stretching the playtime.

[Lemnear]

the def is really high...but the design is uninspired...i can't even finish the trailer for how much is boring...

[Lander]

Very pretty indeed, though reading through the context is a bit of a downer.

Exceptional design and coding skill never were mandatory - case in point many busted old games from the microcomputer scene - but damn if Unity and co. don't make it easier than ever to avoid learning basic fundamentals.
Ah well, old man yells at cloud. Wouldn't have gotten my own start if not for Klik'n'Play, though I was never brazen enough to charge for my learning projects.

This reminds me of Soldner-X on ps3. If you used the D-Pad to move, the inputs were delayed and took more time to stop after release. But if you used the analog stick it was more responsive. Very strange way of designing control.

Likely a result of movement being fundamentally inertia based (i.e. using acceleration -> velocity -> motion instead of just velocity -> motion), and the developer not fully grasping what shmuppers mean by the term.
It sounds like they might be capping velocity based on stick deflection to make it seem snappier for fine motions, whereas digital inputs have to assume max cap at all times and just push in a direction.
One way or another, inertia is inertia.

On more than their bullet hell sequence? Has the author played them? In Nier Automata, they are just a complete joke and evolve nearly not after the little intro sequence. After completing the game, these sequences felt like nothing more but stretching the playtime.

I read that as "did not subsist on", i.e. they're saying the shmup stuff wasn't a key ingredient.
Though, far be it from me to make excuses for armchair marketers snoosplaining broad-appeal industry practices to a bunch of windmills
Can't stand the player / pundit intersection that seems to dominate pop-enthusiast discourse these days - players should care about player things, not about how best to dumb down a perfectly good genre so more people will like it.