STG 101: Intro to Shmups - STG panel @ NorCal conventions

[Frenetic]

This French documentary is great if you haven't seen it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3AHhkq7p3Qw Great interviewers with players and designers.

Aksys might be at Fanime, maybe you can ask for some Deathsmiles related shwag to promote your panel/giveaways. http://www.aksysgames.com/contact/

Highlight Touhou games to attract people to your panel.

It would be nice if you guys could set up some easy shmups to play after the panel, maybe work something out with the arcade guys. I know at AX last year I talked with a really friendly guy who brought Mushihimesama Futari and Deathsmiles XII to the arcade room. He mentioned him and his friends do Fanime as well. Try asking under the Fanime forum here: http://forums.fanime.com/

The GamePro October 2010 issue is on First Person Shooters, but a lot of the articles can be applied to shmups as well. Lots of good research and theory you can use in your panel. Call your local library to see if they have it.

Wish I was at Fanime to see the panel and wish you guys all the best!

--the F-man

[gs68]

Fanime has a gaming room and there's usually 1-3 shmups available at any given time (compared to smaller conventions' gaming rooms where there's nothing but a rhythm game setup and one jillion fighting games), so we could bring that up.

[TrevHead (TVR)]

Wish I was at Fanime to see the panel and wish you guys all the best!

How about filming it and putting it on YT?


As shadowbringer has already mentioned giving them tips on how to actually play them would be good. Like bullet dodging techniques and other suvival tips, The importance of taking the time to learning all of a shmups game mechanics and the best ways of using them for you advantage, maybe showing them an example of it been and not been put into practice (Recca is a good example). Tell them that good planning and pratice is key.

[Frenetic]

I think if you guys could do a demo of the techniques that Prometheus outlined in his Full Extent of the Jam: http://shmups.system11.org/viewtopic.ph ... 97&start=0

that would be really cool. You could do a demo for people very new at shmups and give them advice how to play them better (creeping moves rather than large sweeping to dodge bullets, bullet herding techniques, HEY I SHOULD HARD LASER HERE, etc.)

[Skyline]

Fanime has a gaming room and there's usually 1-3 shmups available at any given time (compared to smaller conventions' gaming rooms where there's nothing but a rhythm game setup and one jillion fighting games), so we could bring that up.

Haha, I may go ahead and set up extra stations for folks to try out stuff if there's a good turnout for your panel. We're already increasing the quantity of setups for the area so accommodations would be no problem.

[Frenetic]

This is so awesome that you guys are putting this on, If I lived up there I would even volunteer to help out with more stuff. I just wanted to suggest a bit more:

I think a lot of doujin shmups are free or have a free demo mode. X.X's Blue Wish Resurrection and his other games are free, right? I think mostly all of the other games have free demo modes. Type them up and hand out to all of the panel attendees.

Since they are computer games, maybe show a little bit of keyboard shmup playing (if Prometheus does it, why can't we?)

[gs68]

Okay, we submitted our panel. We'll let you know on a more definite time for the panel, for those who can make it to Fanime. If this panel succeeds, I may do a "1P" version for cons that Aru can't go to.

Any Bay Area superplayers or kusoplayers wanna volunteer and help us with beginner tips?

[TrevHead (TVR)]

As i said before make sure you camcorder it! :p

[gs68]

Major update: PANEL APPROVED. Actual timeslot and room pending. Aru-san and I will hopefully begin planning things out tomorrow.

[Frenetic]

Congrats guys. Wish I lived up there to help you guys out with the panel, I used to work Anime Expo and was room manager running Audio/Visual. Lemme know if you need any advice/help, etc.

[jepjepjep]

It might be a good idea to show a few seminal games for each subgenre. For example:

[the dinosaur era]
Space Invaders
Xevious

[classic era]
Gradius
R-type
1942
Flying Shark/Hishozama

[manic era]
Batsugun
Battle Garegga
Dodonpachi

[reflect]
Gigawing
MM

[bullet hell]
Ketsui
DOJ
Mushi, etc.

[Doujin]
Touhou
etc.

I think it would be a really cool presentation if you showed some really high-level play from superplays, just to show the ceiling of how intense the experience can be. After that, to show that these games are still manageable, load up a mame save state and go through a medium-difficulty level live, so that the audience sees that these games are manageable.

[Obiwanshinobi]

Sengoku Ace draws attention of non-shmuppers and non-gamers. It looks peculiar like that. Might come in handy if you want people to pay attention.

[Deca]

I'm gonna join in and say once again, please record this. I'm interested to see how it turns out for you guys, sounds like a solid idea.

[gs68]

We'll be looking for a friend to record.

Anyways, date, time, and location have been confirmed! Check the first post, particularly if you are going to Fanime and want to see the panel!

[rancor]

This is so incredible - I wish I could attend. Props to you for putting this together . I'm also hoping that you can record this and put it online.

After sitting through several meetings this week, I have to say that while the content of your presentation may be amazing it won't mean anything without a person hosting who is comfortable with public speaking and is entertaining/loud/clear/humorous/quick on their feet. Please make serious considerations in choosing the right person to lead this discussion. It seems I've seen just about every shade of disaster this past week based almost solely on the person hosting the event.

[gs68]

For those who can't make it to the Fanime edition of this panel, we'll be hosting this panel again at Kin-Yoobi Con in Hayward on August 5~6. Day and time to be determined.

[Devil REI]

I might be able to help with recording... well, recording audio, anyway. Sadly, I'm video-incapable at the moment.

[mdl]

Good panel, guys. Aru-san, if you post the slides somewhere, you can jog my memory so I can give comments like I said I would.

[ratikal]

I hope someone recorded it! Maybe it'll give me ideas (and inspiration if I'm not lazy) to do a similar panel at Anime Boston.

[Aru-san]

Good panel, guys. Aru-san, if you post the slides somewhere, you can jog my memory so I can give comments like I said I would.

I'll give you the slides and the contents of what I had in the video via PM, though I'll have to type it all out from scratch seeing that my wanting to create a dynamic slide show makes for messy babel like this:

[Never_Scurred]

Lolis not enough?
Hang some Cave artwork and let it do the work for ya.

[Blue_Ray]

Sounds like an awesome panel was had. I've seen many panels do a "catch-all" that happen to include shmups, but it's always very brief.

[Aru-san]

Sounds like an awesome panel was had. I've seen many panels do a "catch-all" that happen to include shmups, but it's always very brief.

Seriously, if I was able to capture at the very least the sound, you could hear that it was pretty entertaining, informative, and pretty awesome. I heard from one of the panel attendees that someone was recording video, but I have a feeling that it was probably a short recording because I sorta saw flashes from their camera at certain points.

Most notable moments:
- People actually connecting to the intro video (which consisted of Galaga, NES Gradius, Raiden, Ikaruga, and PCB). People laughed at the flash of "lol Touhou" on the latter.
- The video demonstration of "More bullets != harder game" which just consisted of a death compilation of my runs on Truxton, Xevious, Tiger Heli, and 1943. Everyone was laughing at the epic fail deaths I somehow pulled off in those runs which was more than enough for me.
- A couple of volunteers (one of them being one of my friends) trying out Crimzon Clover Simple mode. Surprisingly, for not having played shmups before, my friend actually almost no-missed the first stage. We had to cut it off at around the second stage, though; we were pretty much grazing our time limit.

[gs68]

Our friend did manage to get a little footage of CC: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/16567705/IMG_0051.MOV

Also my mom just gave me her camcorder, so hopefully at Kin-Yoobi Con when we let ass kick together again we'll have a recording.

At any rate...

We were able to fill a little under half of the seating capacity. We got a lot of positive feedback about the panel, especially on the aforementioned failed montage, as well as having a couple members of the audience give Crimzon Clover a shot.

But anyways, to those who came to the panel: thank you very much! We hope we did the genre justice in introducing it to newcomers.

To those who did attend, what were your thoughts on our panel? Some questions you could answer:
- What do you think we could've done to more effectively present our points? What did you think was outstanding?
- Any details or games we should've covered? Any fact-checking we need to do? (I know we erroneously refered to DoDonPachi as the first game with a 2nd loop, for instance.)

[Deets]

If you're doing this again, a simple solution for recording is to use a smartphone's sound recording/memo feature to record yourself (and crowd audio), and then sync it up with the presentation after the fact using video editing software of some kind. I borrowed a friend's iphone for the last speaking thing I did, and it worked great.

[ratikal]

You guys still going to Kin-Yoobi Con? I looked at the programming and I didn't see you guys in there. :/