Decimal points / scoring psychology

[Frederik]

When I play shmups for score I like to glance up to the score bar to check out how many points I made in the stage I just finished, and see stuff like 1482770, 6500453990 or 31755536640. Sometimes I try to remember where the million mark is by figuring out what what letter of "Player 1" is directly above it (for example).

Shmups have come so far - millions of bullets on screen, fantastic sprite art, glowing hitboxes - but the idea of making scores more quickly readable seems to not have caught on, they are in most cases still just a flat, grey stick of numbers.

Gigawing and Mars Matrix are the only games I remember having more readable scores by giving the decimal points different colors, like this:



DDP DFK BL at least has the courtesy to make the higher digits slightly larger than the lower ones, though it only helps marginally in my opinion:



Maybe I´m just slow in the head for not being able to read a giant row of numbers and quickly being able to tell how many millions and billions I have. I really like the GW/MM system, add some decimal spacers in there and it might just be what I actually want.

Furthermore, I like when shmups (or scoring games in general) give you some sort of additional feedback on how well you´re doing. XII Stag, while being a slightly odd game, announced "new record!" during the stage and once again at the end of the stage whenever you broke your personal best. I believe it even had a little graph at the end.

Tetris The Grandmaster gives you medals for achieving certain goals:



I´m not talking about the typical 360 achievements here, though I have to say that despite all the dismissive comments they get from a lot of oldschool gamers I quite enjoy having these little milestones noted (within reason - I don´t need an achievement for starting up the game for the first time).

Maybe you could hear a little jingle when you reach a certain score, and get a little medal symbol during the end-of-stage score screen. It´s not like games like DDP:DFK are shy on cramming the screen full with giant numbers, stars or 10er-chips already, why not give the actual score a bit more attention?

That´s one of the reasons I enjoy collecting the medals in Batrider so much: It just feels awesome cashing in these huge max medals. It just looks cool and gives you a nice sense of accomplishment. I would love to have something visually and aurally attractive attributed to your score, like an extend jingle but not only tied to actually getting an extend. And maybe give me a rank after each stage and after Game Over, like in Ikaruga.

Am I being unreasonable here? I mean, given the emphasis most modern shmups have on scoring, I would love to see more attention being payed to showing the player when he actually did well.

[Blackbird]

No, I think you're pointing out a perfectly valid design consideration. To be honest, I think it's not implemented very often because it's a relatively small detail that goes overlooked in the grand scheme of things.

[Frederik]

Indeed, just giving the score a little bit more readability would probably take about 5 minutes programming time, and make such a big difference. Come to think of it, it is a lot like phone numbers. I don´t write them all together for the exact same reason - because it´s harder to read.

When I play shmups either on MAME or the CAVE ports on the iPod Touch I end up just making screenshots before and after playing because by the time I end up with a new score I have already forgotten the old one. With Gigawing / Mars Matrix it´s so satisfying to reach "the red numbers", for instance. And most of the time, the smaller digits don´t matter that much in day-to-day play anyways.

[OBSCVRA]

if i remember correctly, Little Big Planet had a system of "jingles" when reaching certain scoring milestones i.e personal best, highest score on friends list etc. Was pretty satisfying to have that small amount of feedback, and was probably not that much of a time sink for the devs. I totally agree that a small inclusion like that can add immensely to the feeling of accomplishment when playing a game for score, and is likely to up my incentive to play that game again, by quite a lot. I dare say a fair few of the posters here would feel the same. Hopefully some of the developers that frequent this corner of the internet will take note, and this thread will start a new trend in gaming

[RNGmaster]

No, I think you're pointing out a perfectly valid design consideration. To be honest, I think it's not implemented very often because it's a relatively small detail that goes overlooked in the grand scheme of things.

That's no excuse. It is the small things that make the atmosphere, and the small things that attract or repel players.

[TVG]

You can't really compare it to TGM as score is kind of irrelevant in these games anyway. It's all about the rank and time.

I can accept most cave games since you usually count your points in millions and don't really give a fuck about the rest of the numbers, albeit seeing from that screenshot DFK must be a total pain in the ass in that regard.
As soon as you step out of the millions it becomes a necessity rather than design, that's what takumi did well. Futari god mode must be a pain for that too.

[TrevHead (TVR)]

Yea 10 digit scores are a pain in the ass unless you colour code them or do what Crimson Clover has done by seperating every 4th digit with a japanese character. Still the japanese system of putting comas in every 4th digit when we seperate them by 3 digits took me awhile to get used to aswell.

I think the UI of a shmup is very important, more so then other genres since taking your eyes off the action even for a fraction of a second can get you killed. Devs should put allot of thought into the design of their UI. And shouldnt put unecessary junk on the screen which can lead to confusion of the player. With traditional shmups is best to stick with the standard layouts like DDPs which most gamers a familiar with.

Thye only exeptio to the rule should be any gauges or timers that the player needs to constantly keep track of when masterfully playing. For example ive forgotton the amount of times ive died due to looking to see if I hadnt broken my chain or at what level my special gauge was at in Mars Matrix. Sure after awhile you do get used to the timings and dont need to look so much at the UI but that can take awhile and can suck the fun out of score play until you do.

More devs should copy from Samidare which showed the shield bar just underneath your ship which greatly increased my fun of the game. Also devs need to use sound effects more, just imagine playing DDP and not having to constantly look at your hit counter since the game would use a sound effect when you broke your chain. If someone with programming skills could make mame cheats like that he would be as popular as Nimitz is atm in the shmup community.

[Frederik]

As soon as you step out of the millions it becomes a necessity rather than design, that's what takumi did well.

Yeah. In the end it comes down to shortening your number, say "today I just did 1.4mil in the first stage of Game X". Nobody is going to memorize these long numbers down to the last point. You could argue that games could go back to lower numbers - but scoring 1.140 points in DDPDFK after doing a complete stage 5 chain might going a bit to far Takumi knew that the scores in Gigawing (and MM) were ridiculously inflated, it feels like a concious design decision (the counterstopping probably wasn´t, but anyways)- and the coloring helped that a lot.

Also, I wish every shmup port had the option to keep track of scores for each individual stage. This way it would be easier to keep track which stage you already do well and which one needs practice. Actually, are there any ports that do this?

if i remember correctly, Little Big Planet had a system of "jingles" when reaching certain scoring milestones i.e personal best, highest score on friends list etc. Was pretty satisfying to have that small amount of feedback, and was probably not that much of a time sink for the devs. I totally agree that a small inclusion like that can add immensely to the feeling of accomplishment when playing a game for score, and is likely to up my incentive to play that game again, by quite a lot. I dare say a fair few of the posters here would feel the same. Hopefully some of the developers that frequent this corner of the internet will take note, and this thread will start a new trend in gaming

This is exactly what I mean. It would be very nice to be able to track where exactly you broke your old score - because most of the time you´re too busy dodging pink clouds. I think this is the heart of the problem: Getting a feel on how well you´re doing while you´re doing it. Collecting medals in Raizing games gives you this feedback in a way because you can instantly see (and hear) how big your medals have gotten (although this is only part of the score).

Another thing I would love is some stat tracking in the console ports, not necessarily stuff like "shots fired" or "number of deaths", but maybe a graph where you could track at what date you achieved what score. I just like when I have some kind of record of my general learning curve in a game. I wish there was some kind of MAME plugin that did that.

As an example, Bangai-O Spirits for the DS is one of my favourite portable games, but I wish it had something like Bronze-Silver-Gold medals for each stage - and make the Gold one almost impossible to get. That way I would have tried way harder at some of these stages. I guess what I´m saying is that it doesn´t matter WHAT the reward for doing stuff in a game is, just there mere fact that there IS a reward is more often than not motivation enough (Aria Of Sorrow/Dawn Of Sorrow soul hunting is a part of my life I´m not proud of, but a good example).

Online leaderboards, however, are already a good example of this. You might never be good enough to get the WR on any of the games you play, but why not try and move from #5670 to #5669 worldwide?

More devs should copy from Samidare which showed the shield bar just underneath your ship which greatly increased my fun of the game. Also devs need to use sound effects more, just imagine playing DDP and not having to constantly look at your hit counter since the game would use a sound effect when you broke your chain. If someone with programming skills could make mame cheats like that he would be as popular as Nimitz is atm in the shmup community.

I think CAVE did some interesting stuff lately too, with the bar going around your ship (Espgaluda, DFK for instance), the hypers directly below your ship in DOJ (you can always tell if and how many you have in stock), or the bombs in Dimahoo (which probably were the inspiration for the hypers in DOJ). Boss life bars both on top and bottom in Mushihime + Futari are pretty clever as well.

There´s also tons of stuff you could do with audio cues. The "almost finished" warning in both Espgaluda games are a necessity, for instance, same as the boss life jingles in the Touhou series.