CYGNI: AGB | Steam, PS5 and Xbox Series 2023

[Nautilus]

.......

I'm not sure maybe its my writing style or as everythign in text writing it could give off wrong impressions, maybe its making it come off as "you all don't understand" or its perhaps my natural instinct to overclarify, I'm acually writing in good faith explaining the "why" and the "reasoning" regarding the inertia or acceleration mix-up. I am stating this because as some ask about it quite passionately and has come up numerous times. I can simply ignore it or reply to it to help clarify it if someone is looking for an answer and then we can go try to do something about it if we can. I wish i could reply in shorter sentences about such questions though.

I agree about Arcade mode coming off shorter than expected. Hopefully that can be addressed sooner than later.

[AntiramDSR]

to leave something constructive:

the first stage with it's 3 bosses was promising...

the remaining ones felt like a slog to play through.

i could have totally see myself replaying stage 1 for score-chasing... but yes, we already mentioned the arcademode shortcomings.

but this is again something people here talked about since 2023... game/stage length.

for cygni... i don't see how patches alone would be able to turn things around at this point.

but, i would totally be interested if you ever decide to do a true twinstick-shooter.

ps: don't take the attitude-thing too strong. no hard feelings

[ExitPlanetDust]

Though I haven’t finished the game yet, I couldn’t imagine playing for score over an hour+ session to lock in a 1CC. Abridged stages would go a long way, but as AntiramDSR said, something like that might not even be possible through patching.

As it stands now I’m approaching the game more like a traditional action game that happens to play like a shmup. Something akin to Future Cop LAPD.

[Jonpachi]

Since we have a developer on the thread, I'm curious if they could help me understand the intended player experience within the ship's XP system.

The game defaults to Medium difficulty, which implies that stage 1-1 at Medium difficulty, with no ship upgrades, is the first experience the game intends for me to have. My personal experience was to try this stage at these settings several times, struggle mightily to keep up, and be forced many times over to sit and watch as bosses timed out and left the screen. As a player, I do not want to downgrade my experience just to progress; I want to keep trying and succeed at what the developer is telling me is the default experience.

Try I did, but finally I relented and bumped the difficulty down to Easy. At that point, with three lives in tow, I was able to meekly march through the game with little effort, all the while feeling like I was missing the "real" experience. Now, I find myself in a bit of a grinding loop, wanting to go and tackle Normal and Hard difficulty, but fearing that I should likely wait and keep grinding up to max level just to ensure I don't waste my time by hitting that power curve wall again.

What is your intent and expectation of player experience here as the design team? Is a fully-powered up ship playing on Hard difficulty the "full" Cygni experience? How to you expect the player to deal with and progress within the XP system?

[ExitPlanetDust]

I’m sure Nautilus will respond, but medium is not balanced for the player to approach the first level without first acquiring upgrades. Players are expected to start on easy and work their way up. This isn’t communicated anywhere in the game. However, after several attempts I was able to route the level well enough and crutch hard on a couple of other unstated mechanics to clear the first stage on medium consistently without upgrades.

Spoiler

Weapon and shield power levels are independent of each other and each can hold 6 levels or stocks. Keeping weapon power at 6 will significantly increase the main guns’ damage output. Missiles should be treated as bombs are in other shmups. Using them will deplete a weapon power stock and weaken the main guns, requiring you to pick up another power up drop to refill the meter. Missiles are not very effective against bosses (at least they aren’t this early in the game) so focus on keeping weapon power topped off and concentrating fire from the main guns on their weak spots.

The ship can hold 6 weapon configurations and I’ve read that each slot varies in power, but I haven’t had a chance to test this. Supposedly the 6th slot does the highest damage when the weapons are at full power.

Here’s how I approach the first level on medium without upgrades:

Farm power ups from the first wave of enemies for currency while weapons and shields are full. For the first boss, only use the main guns at full power. After a couple of circle strafes from its beam attack it should go down.

For the second boss, farm the ground enemies (they look like set dressing, but they’re killable) with the air to ground attack to power up if your weapons are low. When the boss appears, take out the two tentacles. In the next phase, ignore the new tentacles and focus on the boss’s main weak point. It should go down quickly with the weapons at full power.

Route the rest of the stage and try to enter the last boss battle with full weapon power. Focus on dodging its attacks and cutting through a single section of the rock shield it forms to deal damage. It will spit out power ups after some phases. Use them to keep the guns powered and the pressure on.

[Nautilus]

Since we have a developer on the thread, I'm curious if they could help me understand the intended player experience within the ship's XP system.

What is your intent and expectation of player experience here as the design team? Is a fully-powered up ship playing on Hard difficulty the "full" Cygni experience? How to you expect the player to deal with and progress within the XP system?

It's a good question, I'm not sure there is an easy answer for it, I think big part of the problem comes from the lack of better communication to the player (from our part) in a more step by step basis with extra hint boxes and info to ease the player in about the base mechanics, also more info on weapons and their usage would've been better. While some stated that the tutorial was enough others want more, (personally i think providing more info is needed).

If you ask us what we feel of the difficulty level (once someone is aware of the base mechanics) we were worried that "Medium" might still be a bit on the easy side.
During testing with various players we made a rule to beat the entire game on medium ( first 3 stages at least no upgrades and the rest with minimal upgrades to help out) (which you can do). After the release of the game Some players said that its impossible to kill all bosses or ground units in stage 1 without upgrades on Medium.
We can post soon one of our colleagues going through medium difficulty multiple times with no upgrades and she makes it look too easy killing all the bosses and 90% of all ground units in stage1, some of them so early that the rewarding filler units spawn to fill the space.
During our observations we've also seen players either notice something immediately or not notice it at all until one entire playthrough which significantly affect their method and gameplay, One such exmaple: We've had a player on a second run of stage 1 immeditaly notice smaller ground units recharging the shield of the larger ground unit, so if you aim at just large before killiing the smaller ones you would think its a bullet sponge. While another (surprisingly a more seasoned player) never noticed it even after completing 1cc first time and was complaining why he can't kill the large ground unit . I suppose its about how different players approach and notice things.

Hard mode is more difficult but was also brought down a notch as well during later tests.

Easy is meant to be like "Training" mode, fire rates are low, projectiles are slow traveling, enemy units are slow in response time and so on. we never intended easy to be played as first time full experience (maybe just for practice runs here and there, because its much too easy), during tests we saw people jump-in play half way through stage 1 on easy got the controls figured, then jumped back to medium or hard.

"Hard" mode is designed as Cygni's true game intent because the game was designed on hard that includes speed, numbers, method and then toned down.

There are a few good videos posted online with some great playthrough 1ccs, was great to see how people were using different upgrades strategically (even though no info was provided), Raylight for isntance can bypass and not be blocked by large lasers, so people use that during boss laser fights and then switch back to projectiles.

I would say a ship with the following upgrades on hard can already be near full experience: "Homing projectiles" + "at least 8 missiles" + "Radial damage for missiles 50%" + "both ground weapon upgrades" + "Drones".
"RayLight" is a plus but not a must, same with "Shield blast", the latter of which we intend to revise if we get the chance since it was planned to be much more but was cut short on paper and we believe to be the weakest of the upgrades in practice at the moment even though it costs the most.

For pickups in story mode, right now the game registers the pickups only after you complete a stage, we noticed this is making newcomers more frustrated with the lack of resources to upgrade (even on easy) which contirbutes to the problem of potentially getting stuck in a death loop. Ideally if we kept the pickups being registered before stage ends and during combat, this would've been far easier and enjoyable for everyone just jumping in.

Hope this clarifies a bit,

[AntiramDSR]

Since we have a developer on the thread, I'm curious if they could help me understand the intended player experience within the ship's XP system.

What is your intent and expectation of player experience here as the design team? Is a fully-powered up ship playing on Hard difficulty the "full" Cygni experience? How to you expect the player to deal with and progress within the XP system?

It's a good question, I'm not sure there is an easy answer for it, I think big part of the problem comes from the lack of better communication to the player (from our part) in a more step by step basis with extra hint boxes and info to ease the player in about the base mechanics, also more info on weapons and their usage would've been better. While some stated that the tutorial was enough others want more, (personally i think providing more info is needed).

If you ask us what we feel of the difficulty level (once someone is aware of the base mechanics) we were worried that "Medium" might still be a bit on the easy side.
During testing with various players we made a rule to beat the entire game on medium ( first 3 stages at least no upgrades and the rest with minimal upgrades to help out) (which you can do). After the release of the game Some players said that its impossible to kill all bosses or ground units in stage 1 without upgrades on Medium.
We can post soon one of our colleagues going through medium difficulty multiple times with no upgrades and she makes it look too easy killing all the bosses and 90% of all ground units in stage1, some of them so early that the rewarding filler units spawn to fill the space.
During our observations we've also seen players either notice something immediately or not notice it at all until one entire playthrough which significantly affect their method and gameplay, One such exmaple: We've had a player on a second run of stage 1 immeditaly notice smaller ground units recharging the shield of the larger ground unit, so if you aim at just large before killiing the smaller ones you would think its a bullet sponge. While another (surprisingly a more seasoned player) never noticed it even after completing 1cc first time and was complaining why he can't kill the large ground unit . I suppose its about how different players approach and notice things.

Hard mode is more difficult but was also brought down a notch as well during later tests.

Easy is meant to be like "Training" mode, fire rates are low, projectiles are slow traveling, enemy units are slow in response time and so on. we never intended easy to be played as first time full experience (maybe just for practice runs here and there, because its much too easy), during tests we saw people jump-in play half way through stage 1 on easy got the controls figured, then jumped back to medium or hard.

"Hard" mode is designed as Cygni's true game intent because the game was designed on hard that includes speed, numbers, method and then toned down.

There are a few good videos posted online with some great playthrough 1ccs, was great to see how people were using different upgrades strategically (even though no info was provided), Raylight for isntance can bypass and not be blocked by large lasers, so people use that during boss laser fights and then switch back to projectiles.

I would say a ship with the following upgrades on hard can already be near full experience: "Homing projectiles" + "at least 8 missiles" + "Radial damage for missiles 50%" + "both ground weapon upgrades" + "Drones".
"RayLight" is a plus but not a must, same with "Shield blast", the latter of which we intend to revise if we get the chance since it was planned to be much more but was cut short on paper and we believe to be the weakest of the upgrades in practice at the moment even though it costs the most.

For pickups in story mode, right now the game registers the pickups only after you complete a stage, we noticed this is making newcomers more frustrated with the lack of resources to upgrade (even on easy) which contirbutes to the problem of potentially getting stuck in a death loop. Ideally if we kept the pickups being registered before stage ends and during combat, this would've been far easier and enjoyable for everyone just jumping in.

Hope this clarifies a bit,

oh please stop it... the easy answer is that there really is no universal thought that went into leveldesign or balancing... at least nowhere after the first stage.

the 1st stage somehow hides this enough to keep you engaged and to overcome the 3 bosses and the general length. after that it all falls down and only get carried with the constant rain of energy-pick ups in 5 minute long passages of the same enemy-type that keeps spawning again and again and again...

as if all the good things they had in mind went into that one single stage... really felt fooled with everything that followed...

and now the Electric Underground-Dude shows up and we now know that literally EVERY single bad choice you took was intentional because Keelworks believed to know better.

don't get me wrong i'm not mark-fanboying ... i usually tend to disagree with some of his views and allways thought he beeing somewhat nitpicky at times... but he is spot-on this time.

knowing now that there really was someone with genre-knowledge in the early days of development and you just kept going full bloat on everything and ignored every little critic is so mind-blowing full of ignorance.

with this in mind you (Devs) will totally love this review:

https://youtu.be/qetmTh7JIG4?si=ht9W6NyS32mYpGfT

and so we come full circle...

PS: see... it's always the same kind of wall you run into, all the comments (yours included) in the linked reddit-thread to see what really went wrong during development: https://www.reddit.com/r/shmups/comment ... uys_think/

[-Fish-]

2 - On D-Pad and Keyboard Only - game has (in milliseconds) "acceleration ONLY " this is the time taking the ship speed from 0 to 100%. For any casual player this is not-noticeable even by log it is too fast to notice.

In most Shmup games, player ship speed is slow very slow compared to Cygni. so putting acceleration on them is irrelevant and not even considered as a common practice. When considering Ship speed in Cygni relative to its play area you are dealing with many folds that speed.

So soonest you hit a key quickly with the intention to micro-dodge, the key (unlike joysticks) instantly registers 0 or 100%, you will see your ship make a large jump on screen covering vast distances which is the opposite of what you want. To counter this a very very short acceleration is introduced in miliseconds so that quick hits result in small distances covered.

That's the base of it. Its not that we deliberately went out of our way to put it there, its simply because we had to in this instance.

This was later exaggerated to indicate that the game has a lot of inertia.

I have a slight problem with what you stated here Nautilus. STG history shows us that games like Aleste, MUSHA, Gates of Thunder, Gradius and many others were programmed with the ability to alter ship movement speed. In many cases ship speeds even faster than those of Cygni are preferred by players worldwide. These STG's were all programmed with a 1:1 movement ratios as well so what you are saying is not exactly factual when you state: "It's simply because we had to in this instance."

You could of easily remapped one of the 11 console controller buttons to scroll through preset ship speeds like has been done countless times in the past. Or, if a programmer can take a quick moment of time, add a preference to enable/disable acceleration in the options menu. Then the players can decide what actually feels best for themselves.

[AntiramDSR]

Then the players can decide what actually feels best for themselves.

guess he won't like that...

"I love it when Youtube "Shmup experts" judge the game with graphs and preconceived biases without remotely understanding or caring to ask or observing facts and the reasoning behind the setup. Hate for the sake of hating (not that we care but this stuff spreads like wildfire) because why not it gets clicks and makes them look smart.
They've been playing with ships that travel so slow on 3 by 4 aspect ratio for decades and judge it against a very wide screen very fast moving ship with tilting and panning camera system which is part of a gameplay that is neither trying to be a pattern dodger nor a shmup they want it to be."

-Nautilus

very eye-opening comment history he got there on reddit... i'm so out now with this and going to stop commenting here or anywhere else about this game. but not without everyone to see how you, Nautlilus, keep squirming around. *bow and bye

[PC Engine Fan X!]

2 - On D-Pad and Keyboard Only - game has (in milliseconds) "acceleration ONLY " this is the time taking the ship speed from 0 to 100%. For any casual player this is not-noticeable even by log it is too fast to notice.

In most Shmup games, player ship speed is slow very slow compared to Cygni. so putting acceleration on them is irrelevant and not even considered as a common practice. When considering Ship speed in Cygni relative to its play area you are dealing with many folds that speed.

So soonest you hit a key quickly with the intention to micro-dodge, the key (unlike joysticks) instantly registers 0 or 100%, you will see your ship make a large jump on screen covering vast distances which is the opposite of what you want. To counter this a very very short acceleration is introduced in miliseconds so that quick hits result in small distances covered.

That's the base of it. Its not that we deliberately went out of our way to put it there, its simply because we had to in this instance.

This was later exaggerated to indicate that the game has a lot of inertia.

I have a slight problem with what you stated here Nautilus. STG history shows us that games like Aleste, MUSHA, Gates of Thunder, Gradius and many others were programmed with the ability to alter ship movement speed. In many cases ship speeds even faster than those of Cygni are preferred by players worldwide. These STG's were all programmed with a 1:1 movement ratios as well so what you are saying is not exactly factual when you state: "It's simply because we had to in this instance."

You could of easily remapped one of the 11 console controller buttons to scroll through preset ship speeds like has been done countless times in the past. Or, if a programmer can take a quick moment of time, add a preference to enable/disable acceleration in the options menu. Then the players can decide what actually feels best for themselves.

Even the 1989 classic of PC Engine/Turbografx-16 release of Hudson Soft/Compile's Gunhed/Blazing Lazers has four speeds to select "on the fly" at any given time during a serious gaming session of it. This "variable speed option" applies to the PCE/TG-16 console stg release of Super Star Soldier as well. The 1992 PCE/TG-16 stg of Soldier Blade has two speeds of "Low" & "High" to change at will if it needed be also -- it sure makes a difference, crucially, especially if playing the 2 minute or 5 minute Caravan 'Challenge Stage" portions for high scores (and bragging rights).

PC Engine Fan X! ^_~

[guigui]

Completely off-gameplay-topic demand about this game : anyone skilled enough to make a good quality animated .gif of this "I put my pants on" moment ?

Really ? Much much talk about gameplay on this so-so looking game when you can just watch an oh-so slighty and delightly squeezzed buttcheek in it ?
C'mon shmups forum, be guys and choose your favorite direction :



UPWARD









DOWNWARD

[Jonpachi]

TLB

[XoPachi]

I'll never understand the insistence on acceleration or inertia. It's something Western devs specifically want to do but, I don't understand the hang up on that little thing. If you want variable speeds, there's so many answers to that which work. Why are they so dead set on the option that constantly results in worse games?

[PC Engine Fan X!]

Completely off-gameplay-topic demand about this game : anyone skilled enough to make a good quality animated .gif of this "I put my pants on" moment ?

Really ? Much much talk about gameplay on this so-so looking game when you can just watch an oh-so slighty and delightly squeezzed buttcheek in it ?
C'mon shmups forum, be guys and choose your favorite direction :



UPWARD









DOWNWARD

Downward implies that she wants some action, ain't that right? ^_~

PC Engine Fan X! ^_~

[Jonpachi]

Now that I know that your main shot power is tied to your missile stock, I started hoarding power-ups and the whole game broke. Before, there seemed to be an interesting (if unbalanced) risk/reward system of cashing in shield to gain missiles, but the DPS for your main guns with full missile stock is so powerful that it renders all that pointless (including on Hard). Now, I'm just chilling at the bottom of the screen, lazily refilling my shield, and letting my main guns do the work while ignoring the rest.

[Jonpachi]

If you're dumb like me and going for the Platinum, you can get the co-op trophies by just playing on Easy and letting P2 die once. After that, they won't even respawn until a button is pressed allowing you to just play solo for the rest of the stage.

[AntiramDSR]

this is so great:

https://youtu.be/vr20hbn_kek?si=Vq-03ICCPuErfvM1

feels like "my personal cygni-confusion" visualized in the best way possible.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

Now that I know that your main shot power is tied to your missile stock, I started hoarding power-ups and the whole game broke. Before, there seemed to be an interesting (if unbalanced) risk/reward system of cashing in shield to gain missiles, but the DPS for your main guns with full missile stock is so powerful that it renders all that pointless (including on Hard).

Amusingly, this is the same problem Sine Mora appeared to have with its scoring system. It encouraged you not to ever bomb or use your special abilities because they dropped your multiplier; hold shot the entire time, don't get hit, speedkill everything. I'm not sure if it in some situations speedkilling using a bomb was worth the multiplier drop or not though.

Mountain of Faith and Subterranean Animism also do this, where bombs directly eat at shot strength, but it feels really awful if you bomb a few times to avoid hits and are stuck after with a really wimpy weapon. They're not my fave Touhou games, I don't recommend tying player main shot strength to their bomb stock.

Even the 1989 classic of PC Engine/Turbografx-16 release of Hudson Soft/Compile's Gunhed/Blazing Lazers has four speeds to select "on the fly" at any given time during a serious gaming session of it.

There's currently a bunch of games with speed select, but the winner for innovation currently is Drainus, which has a focus movement button like a Touhou game, AND a speed select button which you can hold to adjust both your "normal" and your "focus" speed to whatever you want. You can also do it from the upgrade/shop menu's options screen. You can tweak the speeds so your default ship speed is slow and make the focus button speed you up if you want!