Scoreless shooter mods: "Scoring" for survival

[O. Van Bruce]

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.

To hell PC-98 games, those are completely different from the windows era Touhou... If Touhou would have continued the way of the PC-98 games, I'm sure that nobody would play those games today.

[trap15]

I personally prefer the PC-98 ones to the Windows ones.

[O. Van Bruce]

I personally prefer the PC-98 ones to the Windows ones.

Not because they are bad, but because everyone knows about then through Windows era Touhou.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

To hell PC-98 games, those are completely different from the windows era Touhou...

The last two PC-98 games are not really all that different from EoSD in terms of mechanics, just a bit easier to clear on Lunatic. The Dream bonus scoring is more interesting in MS than EoSD's scoring is, if anything, not to mention I prefer the musical style in the PC-98 games.

[Obscura]

Quick note: The reason I'd be against "chain or lose a life" in DOJ has nothing to do with not liking DOJ chaining (I find it quite fun); the reason I'd be against it is because it'd take an already quite difficult game and raise the difficulty to the point where only a few players could ever make it past the first half of stage 2, and no one would ever make it past stage 4.

[Noah!]

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 think it depends on implementation. The cool thing about OutRun and the like is that any excess score (in this case time) just carries over and applies to the next threshold. This makes things F L E X Y ☆ S E X Y, and allows you to do things like polish up your performance on stages 1-3, then use the excess score to muscle through the problem spots. Then, once those parts aren't a problem, you can apply the score elsewhere. And on and on until the clear, just spreadin' that love like petroleum jelly.

Another cool thing about this system is that it plants mistakes on a gradient, which is a bit harder to do when dealing with survival mechanics. Cave's tried to do this a few times, like with Guwange's life-bar, but to me it always felt arbitrary (different bullets do different amounts of damage, so, different degrees of punishment for the same mechanical mistake?). But within a sufficiently-complex scoring system, you have a number of intermixed factors to prioritize, with varying degrees of boned-ness for messing them up. You could probably do some super-cool stuff with this.

Anyway, to try to bend this into practicality, here's a bit of Keith-style fanfic in the spirit of the original post. It isn't the best, but hopefully it'll illustrate what I'm grasping at.

ARMED POLICE SINEMORA

So we managed to take down GiganTech. Good for us. But wait. Turns out that whole freakin' island is a giant bomb, and if left unchecked, it's gonna take out a good chunk of the earth in 120 seconds.

Bomb the scenery to destroy critical systems that the bomb needs to function! Collect medals to steal the resources needed to make repairs!

In lieu of lives and score, you have a single timer constantly ticking down. The instant it hits 0'00", well, there goes the east coast. Killing enemies does give a nominal amount of time, but the majority of your time stock comes from scenery bombing and keeping your medal chain alive (medals going from +0.1" to +3.0"). Dying is free, however, your bomb stock remains unchanged after death, and it still takes you out of commission for a good five seconds.

Can you hold the bomb off long enough to shut down the core? Can you do it with a minute to spare?

[BareKnuckleRoo]

Cave's tried to do this a few times, like with Guwange's life-bar, but to me it always felt arbitrary (different bullets do different amounts of damage

Uh... no.

There's only two 'types' of damage: touching a bullet or touching an enemy directly. How much damage you take from either type of damage is dependent on whether or not your shikigami is out currently. There is nothing 'arbitrary' about it when you know how it works.

[Noah!]

Uh... no.

There's only two 'types' of damage: touching a bullet or touching an enemy directly. How much damage you take from either type of damage is dependent on whether or not your shikigami is out currently. There is nothing 'arbitrary' about it when you know how it works.

Oops, sorry, I've barely put much time into Guwange at all, so the specifics are a bit fuzzy in my mind. But even looking at that data, to gauge the impact of performing a single "bad" action, you need to pull out a freakin' matrix? Yeah, it's not as random as I made it out to be, but from a design perspective (as well as a player's perspective), it still feels a bit "off."

[BareKnuckleRoo]

But even looking at that data, to gauge the impact of performing a single "bad" action, you need to pull out a freakin' matrix?

Getting hit by a bullet hurts more than touching an enemy, damage is reduced either way if your shikigami is out. SO FUCKING COMPLICATED!1!11one

Really, now you're just exaggerating in order to defend your opinion that you admit was based on having "barely put much time into Guwange at all". You might as well complain about not liking how complicated the scoring system is in a shmup that you've only credit fed.

this thread gives me a headache

[Randorama]

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".

I think that you did not make yourself clear. Can you define "make sense"? Because in the passage below you claim that something does not make sense, without saying exactly why. This makes a reader who does not have your intuitive concept of "make sense" not to understand your passage (and I don't have it, evidently).

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...

Ok, I really need a counterfactual to understand your implicit argument. How the games in question would have been like, if they would have made sense? In a nutshell, please explain how you are using the English expression "make sense".

Aside that, a discussion on an English-speaking forum about a virtually exinct mechanic in a videogame genre that is more or less dead, and has been almost exclusively distributed to the Japanese market for 15 or so...been there, done that, concluded cui prodest?.

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).

So one would have DOJ in which one has to chain or die. Pass, for me, as I said before.

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.

Well, I actually have no clear idea of what would be a boring thing that feels like work. Can you please give me an example? Please keep in mind that I am not an easily bored individual, if this may help, especially at work. So, I am really not sure on why designers should go back to decade-old games and reprogram them.

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?

But I have never said this. How you come to this puzzling conclusion, if I may ask?

One thing is that I generally don't give a damn about settings and graphics. While I like Garegga's design, I would rather play Rayforce, if I were to focus on graphics only. I like 2.5D effects, such as rotations, scaling, parallax, etc. Modern shmups lack them, or implement them in a poor way.

I adore Battle Garegga, but I leave it open if it's a great game or not, as such an assertion would be based on popular consensus, rather than my own opinion.

The main reason is that the game implements and combines together several mechanics that were either marginal (suicide), left aside by players (bombs as weapons: see Masahiro Yuge's interview), and allows a player to implement them in a very flexible way, more or less regardless of the player's goal. Insofar as a player finds a balance that allows to keep him going on, a credit can last until the game is completed.

With Battle Garegga, I was mainly interested in the (daily) experience of incrementally learning new ways of approaching the stages, and yet being able to obtain enough extends to keep playing. While a side-product was a fairly high score, I was more interested in the whole process of discovering what could be done, with the rules programmed by Yagawa. My way of immerging myself in the game was by analyzing its algebraic structure, rather than looking at the pretty colours, so to speak.

Aside this...


This and other threads are full of incredibly vague definitions on which whole arguments hinge. Did anyone distribute Jerry Fodor books at the entrance, or something?

[Noah!]

Really, now you're just exaggerating in order to defend your opinion that you admit was based on having "barely put much time into Guwange at all". You might as well complain about not liking how complicated the scoring system is in a shmup that you've only credit fed.

Yeah, I did exaggerate it a bit. But that's OK, because that was only a minor thing used to illustrate an example, and I don't really care if I'm wrong here. At worst it means that I'll have to just scrap that advantage of the system.

So yeah. In the interest of moving on, how are my big points? I can educate myself about Guwange on my own terms, but it'd be really helpful to get some knowledgable insight from you peeps in this regard (if only for my sake).

[emphatic]

How about:

Code: Select all

ESPGALUDA - BATSHIT VERSION

* Clear a stage with greater gem stock than gold stock - forced stage do-over (impossible to travel back further than 1 stage)
* Forced stage do-over deducts score by 3mil/st1, 7mil/st2, 10mil/st 3, 4, 5 (possibly making do-overs milkable for high level play)
* 500 gems in stock = death (player 2 death sound is triggered at 400, 450 gems as a warning to switch into Kakusei)
* In Normal mode, Gold keeps counting down, 10 every 50 frames
* Kakusei mode = must have 100 gems to enter, depletes gems (10 for every cancelled bullet and gives 1 gold for every cancelled bullet)
* Kakusei over mode = gold increases by 10 for every 6 frames, enemy bullet speed/fire rate increase by 1.5 times for every 100 gold received
* When gold reaches 1000 in Overmode you get thrown out into regular mode 
* Get 1000 gold twice in one stage = extend
* Killing a boss awards player 1 gem for every 10 gold in stock regardless of current gem stock

Wow, that made my head hurt a bit. Hope you are well, Austere.

[Lance Boyle]

Ok, I really need a counterfactual to understand your implicit argument. How the games in question would have been like, if they would have made sense?

Every time I read it it gets worse.

[Randorama]

Every time I read it it gets worse.

You don't need to read it, though.

[Udderdude]

How about:

Code: Select all

ESPGALUDA - BATSHIT VERSION

* Clear a stage with greater gem stock than gold stock - forced stage do-over (impossible to travel back further than 1 stage)
* Forced stage do-over deducts score by 3mil/st1, 7mil/st2, 10mil/st 3, 4, 5 (possibly making do-overs milkable for high level play)
* 500 gems in stock = death (player 2 death sound is triggered at 400, 450 gems as a warning to switch into Kakusei)
* In Normal mode, Gold keeps counting down, 10 every 50 frames
* Kakusei mode = must have 100 gems to enter, depletes gems (10 for every cancelled bullet and gives 1 gold for every cancelled bullet)
* Kakusei over mode = gold increases by 10 for every 6 frames, enemy bullet speed/fire rate increase by 1.5 times for every 100 gold received
* When gold reaches 1000 in Overmode you get thrown out into regular mode 
* Get 1000 gold twice in one stage = extend
* Killing a boss awards player 1 gem for every 10 gold in stock regardless of current gem stock

Wow, that made my head hurt a bit. Hope you are well, Austere.

That sounds like mega overkill and a complete arrange mode. Just have gold count start at 1000 and constantly deplete (except on bosses), if it hits 0 you instantly die (and gold count resets) :3

[austere]

Ok, I really need a counterfactual to understand your implicit argument. How the games in question would have been like, if they would have made sense?

Correlation between what you encounter in reality and what you encounter in the game as well as correlation to the what you have seen in the game previously (now part of your reality, visual and aural stimuli).

So a counterfactual would be, if the mechanics made sense, ships that appear the same would have fired at their maximum capabilities from the very beginning. This is why games usually change the palette or at least give some other kind of indication that you can SENSE when the mechanics have changed rather than a hidden rank. For example, when bosses turn red (I like to say when they 'get angry' hehe) indicating that they're going to be harder to dodge/kill whatever.

Hope you are well, Austere.

Good to hear from you again emphatic. :) I think it should be ESPGaluda - Grounds hog day version!

Collect medals to steal the resources needed to make repairs!

I like where this is going.

All the while offering the player complete freedom on just how they want to divide their focus.

Therein lies the problem though, you have to make a conscious decision to possibly spoil your game. I guess you could say I don't like going to those Korean DIY BBQ joints. ;)

[Randorama]

Correlation between what you encounter in reality and what you encounter in the game as well as correlation to the what you have seen in the game previously (now part of your reality, visual and aural stimuli).

Well, but with your definition of "making sense", rank keeps track of one's current memory resources, aside what one knows about the game. If one is tired, processing current audio/visual stimuli, and integrating them with memories, is harder and more challenging than if one is fresh and relaxed.

In simple words, if a player plays a rank-based game such as Garegga, and scores poorly on Stage 4 because he can't recall all the tricks, fumbles with the joystick, etc. the game will likely be easier, and this will be actually visible to the player, in the form defined below.

So a counterfactual would be, if the mechanics made sense, ships that appear the same would have fired at their maximum capabilities from the very beginning. This is why games usually change the palette or at least give some other kind of indication that you can SENSE when the mechanics have changed rather than a hidden rank. For example, when bosses turn red (I like to say when they 'get angry' hehe) indicating that they're going to be harder to dodge/kill whatever.

Ok.

However:

Most rank systems involve an increase in speed and bullets' amount when rank increases. Case in point, in Battle Garegga rank increases are easy to detect with some practice, as they always involve an increase of either factor.

Those are pretty visible signals that rank has increased, insofar as one has practiced the game to some extent, and he/she is not dumb enough not to figure out that the changes in speed are there (say, unlike half of the forum).

Usually these signals exploit the fact that a player quickly recalls past plays, so a player can evaluate if the attested speed/density of bullets is the same as observed before, or it is higher/lower. A decent player memorizes this new information, deals with it, and will exploit the knowledge that, say, at rank 1 a zaku enemy shoots one bullet at speed 1, at rank 2 a zaku enemy shoots two bullets at speed 2, etc.

One clear complaint against rank systems as involving hidden mechanics is that of hit points. Again, in a game such as Battle Garegga rank clearly affects hit points, but there is almost never a way to visually keep track of this, in the game. It is something for which a player really has to implicitly memorize the rough amount of hits an enemy can take, at a given rank level.

Then again, this is a special case of a larger debate. Cave usually puts energy bars for bosses, and other companies used less precise but still clear visual cues, such as bosses getting angry/damaged. Companies such as Raizing did not and, if anything, they employed several invisible mechanics in their games.

By this point, though, we could actually move on a debate between sense/non-sense (visible/non-visible) mechanics, including those which have the purpose of increasing score.

[Udderdude]

I guess you could say I don't like going to those Korean DIY BBQ joints. ;)

What? Seriously? Those are the best things ever .. :O

I'm surprised no-one has mentioned Sine Mora yet. On arcade's hardest difficulty, you pretty much die unless you're playing perfectly and kill every enemy. Otherwise, you run out of time. Doesn't involve advanced scoring mechanics, but there's an example of that kind of "Play perfectly or die" thing. And not surprisingly, a lot of people didn't like it. It's like built-in restart syndrome, as if the game has OCD and won't let you keep going because you made one mistake .. D:

Edit: Oh well, someone did mention it .. well, it's still relevant. It's just too punishing of a game mechanic.

[Ghegs]

All the while offering the player complete freedom on just how they want to divide their focus.

Therein lies the problem though, you have to make a conscious decision to possibly spoil your game. I guess you could say I don't like going to those Korean DIY BBQ joints.

That's not the game's problem though, it's the player's. You can't put the blame on a DIY BBQ place if it's you who's unable to make decisions.

[zinger]

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).

So one would have DOJ in which one has to chain or die. Pass, for me, as I said before.

Exactly!

Well, I actually have no clear idea of what would be a boring thing that feels like work. Can you please give me an example? Please keep in mind that I am not an easily bored individual, if this may help, especially at work. So, I am really not sure on why designers should go back to decade-old games and reprogram them.

If you don't know what a boring game is we're going to have problems communicating in this thread.

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?

But I have never said this. How you come to this puzzling conclusion, if I may ask?

One thing is that I generally don't give a damn about settings and graphics. While I like Garegga's design, I would rather play Rayforce, if I were to focus on graphics only. I like 2.5D effects, such as rotations, scaling, parallax, etc. Modern shmups lack them, or implement them in a poor way.

I adore Battle Garegga, but I leave it open if it's a great game or not, as such an assertion would be based on popular consensus, rather than my own opinion.

The main reason is that the game implements and combines together several mechanics that were either marginal (suicide), left aside by players (bombs as weapons: see Masahiro Yuge's interview), and allows a player to implement them in a very flexible way, more or less regardless of the player's goal. Insofar as a player finds a balance that allows to keep him going on, a credit can last until the game is completed.

With Battle Garegga, I was mainly interested in the (daily) experience of incrementally learning new ways of approaching the stages, and yet being able to obtain enough extends to keep playing. While a side-product was a fairly high score, I was more interested in the whole process of discovering what could be done, with the rules programmed by Yagawa. My way of immerging myself in the game was by analyzing its algebraic structure, rather than looking at the pretty colours, so to speak.

Aside this...


This and other threads are full of incredibly vague definitions on which whole arguments hinge. Did anyone distribute Jerry Fodor books at the entrance, or something?

This too.

My argument is for those who believe (although they might have forgotten, as I had to some extent) that shooting games should be about speed, swindle-inducing backdrops, the feeling of single-handedly taking on an entire army, things exploding and so on! I always felt that G.Rev's CEO was on to something when he concluded that what makes a great shooting game is an enemy disappearing in a nice explosion. The action experience comes first for me in shooting games, is what I want to say, and when some goddamn algebraic structure analysis challenge gets in the way of the action (as it does in Garegga), it pisses me off! These are shooting games we're talking about after all, not Safecracker. I want to use my bombs for battle, as weapon, not as a... Texas Instrument. But I guess we're just different there.

[Randorama]

If you don't know what a boring game is we're going to have problems communicating in this thread.

Indeed. What is a boring game and why, if I may ask?

The action experience comes first for me in shooting games, is what I want to say, and when some goddamn algebraic structure analysis challenge gets in the way of the action (as it does in Garegga), it pisses me off! These are shooting games we're talking about after all, not Safecracker. I want to use my bombs for battle, as weapon, not as a... Texas Instrument. But I guess we're just different there.

Any shmup is a software program that shows pictures, as a way to be more appealing to the consumer. So, in order to just survive, a player has to understand the (algebraic, to an extent) problems presented by the game, At a minimum, any shmup allows a player to survive if the player can connect the vectors that are defined by the ships' position head to toe, and without any of these vectors connecting with the bullets' vectors.

I agree that many modern games involve way more than this simple geometry exercise, but they do so also to offer an action experience. Some complex score systems reward the player with more challenging and satisfying events, if a player can at the same time "dodge bullets", and analyze the fine-grained mechanics and stage lay-outs of the game. If the game has a well-thought design and the player is skilled in both aspects, later gaming sections are more about a virtuoso exercise in performing well-known patterns, than number-crunching sessions.

Say, in Border Down I spent months figuring out the best stage patterns but, in doing so, I was also able to access more and more complex fights and patterns, as a consequence. Once I figured out the best routes, playing the game was about being able to successfully complete each fight.

So, in most modern shmups there is a planning layer that is intertwined with an "action" layer. Whether this layer becomes an hindrance to the action layer or not, is not something I would not take for granted. Not every game forces you to count the enemies appearing on screen to get a medal, as in Garegga. And, nothing implies that a rich planning layer detracts from the big explosions and the fancy bullet patterns, obviously enough.

Without the planning layer, we would have had 30 years of Phoenix and Defender. Probably, we wouldn't have: shmups wouldn't have survived against more complex, and probably more interesting, arcade competitors.

[PROMETHEUS]

Wow randorama, I just noticed you had Chomsky in your signature. That makes me a fan of you now :D