Scoreless shooter mods: "Scoring" for survival

[Randorama]

Randorama: Two points? I count three? Or wait, one was a slow point and the other two were quick?

Ahem, miscounted.

The fact that DOJ chaining is boring for me is proof enough. For me, that is. But it doesn't matter, it was just an example. My point was that systems that "feel like work" shouldn't be forced upon any player.

I don't see who's forcing you to play DOJ, or any other shmup, in a certain way. Do you have Ikeda pointing a gun at you when playing? Most modern shmups give a remarkable range of options, on how one approaches the game. This could have been a possible reason on why a conceptual distance between "playing for score" and "playing for survival" formed, in the first place.

As for Garegga without a rank system, medals and a score counter being Gun Frontier with different graphics? You've got to be kidding me? Gun Frontier is one of the most sedate arcade shooters in existance, while Garegga on the other hand is tsunami inducing manic hell!

Interestingly, I got it wrong. Gun Frontier has rank, and at higher rank levels the screen is literally flooded with enemies and bullets. If anything, Battle Garegga has medals, and it is more fast-paced. So, Garegga without rank and medals would be more like, uhm, Kyukyoku Tiger or something like that.

I agree with everything Ghegs has said in his last post, anyway. But let me re-iterate one point which seems to be worth re-iterating:

Well rank doesn't make sense (I mean, why don't they just fire at you with full force, lol)

Rank was a system that several past games implemented to make the difficulty of a level, section, stage, etc. more or less hard, with respect to player's performance, and that first appeared in check-point based games such as Gradius.

In the past, programmers possibly designed stages and their difficulty with respect to an intended attack power of the player's ship. Rank allowed to make stages harder if the played showed to have mastered a game enough to e.g. reach a stage at full power, or make the game easier if the player somehow stumbled and up until a certain stage, without enough power-ups.

It allows for a more flexible playtime-per-credit ratio, which is a golden standard by which programmers and arcade operators (say, my uncle...) approached the conundrum of difficulty. Five to ten minutes per coin, usually corresponding to stage 3/4 out of 6/7 stages, were a common target up until the late '90s.
In fact, several shmups have bottleneck stages at this time/stage mark...

Many modern games have more flexible difficulty systems, e.g. extra enemies or enemy sequences, which often are intertwined with the possibility to score higher scores.

So, bitching and whining about rank in 2012 is a bit late, among other things.

[Erppo]

I guess Futari Ultra is the most played game of all the people who want survival difficulty equal to your standard higher level scoring?

Of course, it will take quite some time to make sure the game doesn't rush you into a difficulty that spoils the game. But it should be a very difficult challenge to complete the game, no compromise on that one.

There's one inherent problem in this design. In games with advanced scoring, easy starting stages are not really a problem since you can just focus on optimizing your score in those when you are still at the point where you are struggling to get past the later stages. However when the game is modified such that you only need to pass some "score" threshold and scoring doesn't exist beyond that, it removes all that excitement from the early game.

[AEL]

Espgaluda
Overmode is removed (you are simply kicked out of kakusei once you run out of gems), but the bullets will turn red and fast if in normal mode without gold (perhaps even turn into harder patterns, closer to Espgaluda Arrange). You start the game with half of the gold you can carry so you start with a fighting chance, and will need to properly use kakusei to keep your gold stock above zero.

Psyvariar series
Your machine uses the revolutionary new power source of absorbing heat from grazing bullets. Completely ecofriendly! Every bullet grazed builds a few frames worth of power up to some fitting limit.

Giga Wing
Just adding to the energy idéa. For each bolt of energy collected, the depletion rate of energy turns ever so slightly faster until it becomes impossible to keep up. The key would then be to regulate how much energy you collect. This turns the existing system into something else I admit, but I'd like to try and play this.

[Aliquantic]

A quick mention for Ikaruga Prototype too, where you have to absorb bullets to keep shooting due to limited ammo... it makes Easy mode pretty funny too given its lack of bullets and no suicide bullets for easy refills.

[austere]

I guess Futari Ultra is the most played game of all the people who want survival difficulty equal to your standard higher level scoring?

I think a big point is being missed (which is why I'm ducking out, despite starting this thread) here. I mean you could have used any of the thousand shooters made before they started creating scoring mechanics.

There's one inherent problem in this design. In games with advanced scoring, easy starting stages are not really a problem since you can just focus on optimizing your score in those when you are still at the point where you are struggling to get past the later stages. However when the game is modified such that you only need to pass some "score" threshold and scoring doesn't exist beyond that, it removes all that excitement from the early game.

If the game is designed well, the excitement is always there, more so than when you're "playing for score" and stuck on a latter stage, having optimised your score on the early stages and having to restart because we screw up here and there.

So, bitching and whining about rank in 2012 is a bit late, among other things.

It's *never* too late to bitch and whinge my friend. ;) I'm well aware of the operational reason for rank, I apologise but you have misinterpreted what I meant by "sense". When you're playing Super Mario Bros. and you encounter a green turtle, it behaves in very much the same way in the first stage as it does in the last. But in most shooters, the same enemies popping up are changing their firing rate/density/pattern throughout the game, quite often during the same stage. Once you've encountered enough of these games you start to expect it of course, but it doesn't really make sense, read my mock Garegga suggestion to see what I'm talking

I really wish I hadn't invented this retarded idea, even as a joke.

I don't know what you mean by it being your idea, but I guess it's obvious enough that everyone can think of it independentally. I checked out Outzone as Deca suggested by the way, cool game.

They have a real purpose - the score itself.

Which has no purpose in the game, past the extends of course. The players do create the purpose, outside of the game.

Besides, to me, a past-time competition is always about how much time you put in compared to what "result" you produce. For example, how many credits it took you to clear the game if you never continue. That would be a real indication of one's hand-eye coordination, especially if the game was intuitive (and complex) enough so that the difficulty scaled up without having to add any silly tricks/gotchas into the game that need to essentially be memorised.

I mean, I played Deathsmiles for about 15 credits and I cleared it. Didn't know/care about the scoring system at all. I never went back to it, I just cannot be motivated to conciously make the game harder. Besides, I finished the damn thing. :P

The basic gameplay of shmups is generally very intuitive - dodge and shoot. It's only when certain score mechanics are introduced when you have to do unintuitive things like suicide to live, or letting enemies survive long enough to fire so you can buzz/reflect/transform/etc their bullets, even though you could easily destroy them beforehand. But many actually like these things, since it forces them to think outside the box and work things out in a different way to what they've done in so many other shmups already.

The counter-intuition I'd want to get rid of, while retaining these mechanics in a way that the players cannot ignore.

Aliquantic, is the Prototype version playable on the Xbox 360 port? Sounds like something I'd want to try out.

[trap15]

This thread sucks, I disagree with everyone.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9QmcbZHg34

[BareKnuckleRoo]

I mean, I played Deathsmiles for about 15 credits and I cleared it. Didn't know/care about the scoring system at all. I never went back to it, I just cannot be motivated to conciously make the game harder. Besides, I finished the damn thing.

Wait, what? You apparently can't be bothered to learn the scoring system of a game you presumably enjoy (since you stuck with it long enough to clear it) whose mechanics are flexible enough that it allows you to learn to score at your own pace as well as gives you route/difficulty options for both beginners just wanting the satisfaction of 1ccing it and experts looking to get high scores, but you think it'd be a fantastic idea if someone made a shmup that forced players to rigidly master a score-to-survive system (in addition to having to dodge bullets) just to clear it, and would ultimately cause more early restarts for minor screwups. How exactly is that a good design idea...?

[austere]

But but I like Deathsmiles it's a FINITE GAME (as opposed to infinite games, like the universe, possibly, lol) UNLIKE DONKEY KONG WHICH HAS NO END EXCEPT THAT DARN KILL SCREEN THAT STOPS YOU FROM GOING ON BECAUSE YOU'RE MENTALLY CHALLENGED ENOUGH TO PLAY BEYOND WHAT THE PROGRAMMERS THOUGHT WAS POSSIBLE HURRR

See what I did there, completely derailed your reply and added things from previous posts, like a bratty little girl with ADHD would. Much like you did, all I'm missing is a reaction image, which I frankly cannot scourge up the time or effort to produce for you at the moment.

Like I said, the point of this thread is clearly too difficult for some to understand, despite me making it absolutely clear in the opening post and follow up replies, that is why I am met with reaction images and one liners by them. Anyway, there's no way people of your limited cognition will generate any reply with more detail than the current people who are making an effort in challenging the idea (such as Ghegs, Randorama and so on) based on their own preference. Good day.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

If someone ever happens to pay you for your poorly thought out game design ideas I am buying a space ship

then I will fly it into the sun, because that would be the only way my brain would be able to cope.

I have never seen someone so fervently defend such an ill-conceived idea. Also, kind of ironic of you to call me uncouth when you're resorting to character attacks by claiming anyone who thinks it's a bad idea has "limited cognition". Stay classy.

[austere]

It's not that you think it's a bad idea, it's the kind of behaviour you've put on display for us all along with the poorly thought out (and in instances, researched) replies you've "enriched" this thread with.

All you had to do was to actually read what I was proposing rather than hallucinate it, how exactly do you imagine "forced restarts" if I'm advocating an intuitive design based on survival. You haven't thought it through at all, you're just stuck on what you're used to and lack the broader experience to realise it.

[Despatche]

Counter-intuitive design is not the issue you're looking for. The entire "playing for score"/"playing for survival" separation was created by people who don't understand how games work (superplayers prove this), yet I still enjoy finding alternate ways to play these games. austere, I was hoping you would be able to understand all of this, and somehow this is disappointing. Oh well, you don't care and I don't matter, I suppose.

Interestingly, I got it wrong. Gun Frontier has rank, and at higher rank levels the screen is literally flooded with enemies and bullets. If anything, Battle Garegga has medals, and it is more fast-paced. So, Garegga without rank and medals would be more like, uhm, Kyukyoku Tiger or something like that.

That was one thing I never understood about Twiddle; he always maintained that Battle Garegga had very little to do with Gun Frontier, when it was more of a sequel than Metal Black could ever hope to be. It's much like Border Down to Metal Black, actually.

[austere]

Counter-intuitive design is not the issue you're looking for. The entire "playing for score"/"playing for survival" separation was created by people who don't understand how games work (superplayers prove this), yet I still enjoy finding alternate ways to play these games. austere, I was hoping you would be able to understand all of this, and somehow this is disappointing.

Well, at least you have high expectations, Despatche. =) But I don't understand you completely, how is it a separation created by people who don't understand it? Feel free to expand on this, I'll just say that I'm not a big fan of "massive number of ways to complete game x" type of deals. That's why I can't stand achievements, I just want to finish a game and be happy with it.

[Giest118]

I'll just say that I'm not a big fan of "massive number of ways to complete game x" type of deals. That's why I can't stand achievements, I just want to finish a game and be happy with it.

Most game developers recognize that the presence of choice is important in their game; that's why most shmups have more than one ship type to choose from, and why scoring systems tend to be more or less optional. It's specifically because it will appeal to more people that way. Same goes for those achievements you just mentioned; you don't need to go for all of them. Just beat the game; that's your choice.

The reason this thread has generated so much misplaced negative feedback is that it sort of sounds like you want to produce games that take away some of that choice.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

That's why I can't stand achievements, I just want to finish a game and be happy with it.

Basically, you want a game that only has one 'correct' way to play, and people wanting to do weird stuff like no-slowdown/focus shot or pacifist runs (edit: or Espgaluda full kakusei/overheat 1ccs, holy shit) be damned; play the 'right' way, or get fucked.

[austere]

Ship choice is a different matter, it's both an asthetic and mechanic change. It's quite welcome if it changes the strategy you need to take without you having to conciously destroy your chance of completing the game (by choosing a crippled ship, for example, which shouldn't be in the game at all).

[Giest118]

Ship choice is a different matter, it's both an asthetic and mechanic change. It's quite welcome if it changes the strategy you need to take without you having to conciously destroy your chance of completing the game (by choosing a crippled ship, for example, which shouldn't be in the game at all).

I think you may have just missed my point. All choice is equally valid, and all choice gives players more ways to play the game. This includes choosing not to play for score.

Your idea is interesting, I just don't agree with the design choice of changing something that's usually left to the player's discretion into something absolutely mandatory.

[Despatche]

Well, at least you have high expectations, Despatche. =) But I don't understand you completely, how is it a separation created by people who don't understand it?

That's what people do with everything, all the time. When they don't understand the rules, they make up their own, sometimes under the guise of "not caring"... oh, it's "not caring" alright, but not the kind they tell you about.

Feel free to expand on this, I'll just say that I'm not a big fan of "massive number of ways to complete game x" type of deals. That's why I can't stand achievements, I just want to finish a game and be happy with it.

Collectable achievement badges aren't necessarily part of that mindset, that is simply the developer wishing to acknowledge all these different ways. They're rarely done right anyway... regardless, I think it's better to leave the badges out, or else these ways would become intentional. There should be one or two ways the game is "supposed" to be played (explicitly stated by the developers), and you should not have to play the game in those ways unless you want to seriously discuss them... see above.

[austere]

Don't confuse massive for multiple. Massive means the game just isn't that challenging. There's a massive number of ways of throwing a ball in a hoop on your own, but throw good players and strict rules into the field and suddenly you have a good game. You wouldn't suddenly start playing while sending SMSes on your phone as a extra challenge, for example.

I guess some people love certain games so much they'd play subsets of them, I understand that. I've finished RTS games with different strategies which opened up different kind of challenges. Part of the fun I have playing action games though, is really seeing what's next. Some of the games are so charming that I'd play through them a few times, but honestly, after a while, it turns the game to shit. I had to play DOJBL, my favourite shooter, lots and lots of times when reverse engineering it and also when emulating the audio chip in MAME. Now, heh, I guess the 5th stage and Hibachi is something that really gets me into it, but the rest really died for me. Which is sad, because there won't be another game like it.

[Despatche]

oh come on, at least "complicated" versus "complex" has something going for it, that whole paragraph is just sad. no, seriously, the sms thing was stupid. try, instead, using your weak hand for everything, there's a good challenge.

but... the second paragraph makes me very uncomfortable and i'm not sure i can stay in this discussion anymore

[austere]

...the second paragraph makes me very uncomfortable and i'm not sure i can stay in this discussion anymore

I think you'll find it is a natural reaction, ask trap15 about Ketsui.

[Despatche]

oh no, he's here. i edited stuff. and no, trap never told me about this until now.

oh, and no, "natural reaction" is certainly not the term i'd use to describe this. i think that whole mess goes deeper.

edit: of course you do you little punk, you're not reading any of this, you never do

[austere]

I'm chuckling, no need to expand on your point, I think you're way off.

[RNGmaster]

Yo austere, sorry for misinterpreting the OP. I certainly think that Noah's idea about reaching score thresholds = progression is an interesting idea in concept, but I find I can't enjoy scoring that much if all it is is reaching one threshold after another rather than continually trying to better your score at a finite game. That sort of game would only end when you walk away.

I don't see any way to have a game that a) requires score for progression and b) is finite without c) being frustrating as hell. That's the dilemma with your idea as I see it.

Hope I'm not rambling.

[wiNteR]

I think one of the problems is that for this kind of idea to work in a really good way you would have to have a player ship/character that has high number of resources. The problem with a lot of post-DDP games, that make them difficult for these kind of modifications, is that their essential focus is on enemy formations and bullet patterns and less on giving the player fancy stuff.

Also, one would have to make sure that the off-set of difficulty increase for the player not giving attention to tricks/risks used to increases resources is higher than the risks themselves, but still avoids the game from becoming dull (which I suspect happens in RSG?) or completely impossible.

Between I have always thought how would an STG turn out to be if the player character had a melee reflect weapon that could reflect some kinds of enemy bullets (similar to S&P2). Gunbird-2 almost does it but it's too bad that there is no reflect ^^. The way S&P2 uses it is quite brilliant (becomes more apparent in hard mode). For example, some boss fights the idea is to reflect as a necessity to compensate for lesser fire power the player has and make life easier. Now in a STG you could essentially have a boss that has bullet patterns (with both types of bullets) and dashing, while still retaining precise controls for the player.

[Ghegs]

They have a real purpose - the score itself.

Which has no purpose in the game, past the extends of course. The players do create the purpose, outside of the game.

You say that like it's a bad thing. If a game has two aspects to it, is it not greater compared to a game that only has one? Even more so if the other aspect can exist outside the game like score does, is it not greater to exist in two ways rather than just one? All the while offering the player complete freedom on just how they want to divide their focus.

That's getting a tad philosophical about it.

[zinger]

The fact that DOJ chaining is boring for me is proof enough. For me, that is. But it doesn't matter, it was just an example. My point was that systems that "feel like work" shouldn't be forced upon any player.

I don't see who's forcing you to play DOJ, or any other shmup, in a certain way. Do you have Ikeda pointing a gun at you when playing? Most modern shmups give a remarkable range of options, on how one approaches the game. This could have been a possible reason on why a conceptual distance between "playing for score" and "playing for survival" formed, in the first place.

The whole point of this thread is to reintegrate scoring mechanics so that you have use them in order to survive (check austere's original post again). Herr Schatten (along with a few others as I remember it) was put off by the idea of forcing the player to make boring things that feel like work. And I agree, a lot of scoring mechanics do feel like work, and therefore shouldn't be reintegrated like this. The designers should come up with a better system.

As for Garegga without a rank system, medals and a score counter being Gun Frontier with different graphics? You've got to be kidding me? Gun Frontier is one of the most sedate arcade shooters in existance, while Garegga on the other hand is tsunami inducing manic hell! :D

Interestingly, I got it wrong. Gun Frontier has rank, and at higher rank levels the screen is literally flooded with enemies and bullets. If anything, Battle Garegga has medals, and it is more fast-paced. So, Garegga without rank and medals would be more like, uhm, Kyukyoku Tiger or something like that.

I'm surprised you think Garegga's greatness has so much to do with the rank and seem to be relatively uninterested in the jaw-dropping setting Raizing has created for us, or the bullet patterns?

[Despatche]

i'd be legitimately surprised if anyone went on about garegga's setting for any reason besides lolis having invaded everything in recent games.

[Lance Boyle]

I'm surprised you think Garegga's greatness has so much to do with the rank and seem to be relatively uninterested in the jaw-dropping setting Raizing has created for us, or the bullet patterns?

Garegga's thunderous, resonant soundtrack sensorily drowns out every non-aesthetic element of the game for me. I do appreciate the esoteric and secret-laden scoring systems and how tied they are to stage and (especially) enemy design, that is, when I'm capable of paying attention to them. I can't survive long enough (past stage 4) for rank to have a visible effect, and I'm sure that's true for most people babbling about rank in the game.

i'd be legitimately surprised if anyone went on about garegga's setting for any reason besides lolis having invaded everything in recent games.

If you don't find the canyon reveal jaw-dropping, you won't find anything. I can't think of any military-themed shmup with a richer setting.

Let's derail this latest in a series of worthless threads (worthless, that is, unless someone takes one of the many workable concepts here and makes a decent romhack out of it, so we may have something tangible to discuss rather than theorizing whether it will or won't be inferior to the original game) by talking about how awesome Garegga's setting and soundtrack is.

EDIT: There is some bullshit somewhere about the worth of mechanics being indicated solely by whether they are worth discovering as opposed to spoiling them with a strategy guide, and as everyone here already knows: the value of a mechanic is not principally in whether it is fun to discover, but whether it is fun to exploit. I'd like to see those detractors play a strategy game without tooltips.

Well, that wouldn't be too difficult if one considers (lol) Civilization to be some pinnacle of complexity compared to the works of Paradox, just as nobody sees it fit to compare the systems between a Psikyo and a Cave for more than a few words.

[O. Van Bruce]

hmmm

About the topic:

There is certainly a need to redefine what surviving and scoring are on a shmup. Survival takes a different approach to the game as it needs less time to think about the game and more time to play it: The only real way to do a run on DOJ death label is to play it over and over again because you'll need the experience earned on the real runs. Scoring takes more time outside of the game because you actually know the layout of the stages and can clear then; the big job is to theorize the best way to "milk" the game... everything is calculated and sometimes dull and boring routines have to be learned.

There is merit on who is doing all the theoretical job and analysis of a shmup in order to max out the score but most of the people only want to clear the games and if the game is easy to clear, then the fun stops there.


Now, what happens when both concepts mix? we get Touhou.... yes, Touhou...


In Touhou, the score is utterly pointless for survival as most of the extends and bombs and everything needed for it are given in some way or another without having to look at the numbers on the top... the only exceptions to this rule are Embodiment of Scarlet Devil and Mountain of Faith which give extends for the score, but the amount of points needed is utterly low: Even playing like shit you should get all of the extends on MoF... it's a little more difficult on EoSD though. And, even if you manage to clear Normal difficulty you can continue having fun with Hard and Lunatic or simply start scoring on Normal... 2 perfectly valid paths. Do you understand now why so many people play Touhou and not other shmups? It has one of the most competitive scoring comunities without alienating those who only want to clear the game.

PD: I'm amused by the amount of score fags butthurted on this thread... could you please stop thinking the shmups world is all about your opinions?

[trap15]

In Touhou, the score is utterly pointless for survival as most of the extends and bombs and everything needed for it are given in some way or another without having to look at the numbers on the top... the only exceptions to this rule are Embodiment of Scarlet Devil and Mountain of Faith which give extends for the score, but the amount of points needed is utterly low: Even playing like shit you should get all of the extends on MoF... it's a little more difficult on EoSD though.

All of the PC98 Touhou games would like a word with you.

PD: I'm amused by the amount of score fags butthurted on this thread... could you please stop thinking the shmups world is all about your opinions?

But we were asked to give our opinions in the first place...