Seeking feedback for a Shmup idea...

[Mloren]

Hi all,

So we're making a Shmup for a uni assignment and I'd like to run my idea past everyone here to get some feedback.
The main point of the assignment is to come up with a unique scoring mechanic, so that's what this focuses on.

The color mechanics are borrowed a bit from Ikaruga, but I think they differ enough.
Here are the mechanics:

1. The player begins the game with 3 different weapons, each of which shoots different colored projectiles... lets say Blue, Green and Red (actual colors still to be determined).
These three weapons are assigned to different buttons and the player can fire all three at once or in any combination, firing all at once would mean that the player is firing three times as many shots and that would mean that the game is easier, but this will also lead to a lower score because it violates the scoring mechanic (see below).

2. Enemies come in different colors as well: Blue, Green, Red and Black (covered later).

3. If the player shoots an enemy with the matching colored weapon, it deals extra damage.

4. Each weapon has an upgrade bar. Every time the player hits an enemy with that weapon, they gain a bit in that upgrade bar and when it's full, the weapon gets better.
Hitting an enemy with the matching colored weapon gains significantly more in the upgrade bar than hitting with a different weapon, so the optimal path towards getting the most upgraded weapons is to match colors.

5. The player gets points for every enemy killed.

6. The player has a combo meter which is filled a little bit every time the player hits an enemy with the matching color. If the meter is full, the player gets bonus points for every kill. The meter resets if the player hits an enemy with the wrong color.

7. Some enemies (especially bosses) may change colors. They will have some visual element to indicate when this is about to happen (maybe flashing for a moment or something) so the player knows to stop shooting, otherwise even if the player stopped the moment the enemy changed, there could be some projectiles still in flight.

8. Some large enemies could have sections that are different colors, and those sections may move around slowly. So you have to shoot the correct spot with the correct color.

9. Black enemies don't match any colored weapon, but always have either a colored section somewhere or change color at some point during their flight.

So those are the main mechanics, does this sound like something that would work or is it too convoluted?

[Ghegs]

Moving thread to Development.

[O. Van Bruce]

Hi Mloren and welcome to the forum! interesting Ideas you have there. sounds like lots of fun to play that game but you'll have to really plan well the stages layout to make it enjoyable: focus specially on making the enemy patterns and layout easy to remember and plan while giving a challenge to the player with the bullet patterns and enemy combinations. You have a good example on Ikaruga but take a look also to DaiOuJou. Since this is an university project you may go with what you have described without problems.

But, if you are aiming to produce a shmup outside of the limits of an university project, will you read my suggestions about how to improve the gameplay?

1. The player begins the game with 3 different weapons, each of which shoots different colored projectiles... lets say Blue, Green and Red (actual colors still to be determined).
These three weapons are assigned to different buttons and the player can fire all three at once or in any combination, firing all at once would mean that the player is firing three times as many shots and that would mean that the game is easier, but this will also lead to a lower score because it violates the scoring mechanic (see below).

Don't make the game too easy or that would kill the enjoyment of only playing it for survival. Lots of people like to play shmups only for the enjoyment of dodging bullets.

6. The player has a combo meter which is filled a little bit every time the player hits an enemy with the matching color. If the meter is full, the player gets bonus points for every kill. The meter resets if the player hits an enemy with the wrong color.

I'd go with a multiplier that gets bigger and bigger as long as you continue the chain. That would make the differences scoring and non-scoring huge. You could also make this multiplier to gain numbers quickier by staying close to the enemies while you shoot with the right colour: This would make the gameplay more active and aggresive. To encourage scoring, extends should be bound to score.

If you go with the multiplier idea:

There is a problem if you reset the multiplier if you fail. The game becomes too strict and it may become frustrating to a lot of people who don't want to sit through hours and hours just to perfect completely the stages. Instead, why not making the multiplier decrease if you shoot with the wrong colour? that would make the scoring more forgiving and make people more interested in scoring.

You can get some ideas about stage layout and patterns from Ketsui or Mushihime-sama Futari Black Label Original.

8. Some large enemies could have sections that are different colors, and those sections may move around slowly. So you have to shoot the correct spot with the correct color.

Make bosses and/or enemies have diferent parts you can destroy. You can play with that and make the boss patterns change if you destroy certain parts and in certain orders. Another idea would be to only let the player get the full value of the boss by destroying all its parts before the main body. This, jointly with the multiplier that you had build up during the stage would make people consider bosses as an important part of the scoring together with the stages.

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Welp this are my 2 cents.

[DrInfy]

1. The player begins the game with 3 different weapons, each of which shoots different colored projectiles... lets say Blue, Green and Red (actual colors still to be determined).
These three weapons are assigned to different buttons and the player can fire all three at once or in any combination, firing all at once would mean that the player is firing three times as many shots and that would mean that the game is easier, but this will also lead to a lower score because it violates the scoring mechanic (see below).

Not a very good idea. It would work a lot better if it worked like a super weapon or bomb and would drain power or ammo and/or have a recharge timer so that the player can't spam the super attacks with multiple colors non-stop. You have to make players work and think for their survival or they'll get bored pretty quickly.

[gray117]

I wouldn't bother with the rpg-weapon-upgrades unless there was a kind of supporting reason for it or it was the single gameplay mechanic over the color system ... perhaps even a replay/loop mechanic...?

However, I would be more tempted by your colour idea... Best to hinge your game on a single identifiable design than reaching too far - at least at first

As DrInfy said you could probably do with a system here that doesn't rely on simply the score vs. difficulty balance. Perhaps a heat build up bar if you're using more than one shot type? Player could explode, or perhaps less drastically made unable to fire multiples until heat lowers.

The reason I'd promote this idea is that otherwise you're most showy game would otherwise be the score nerfed version. Also whilst the idea is kind of nice in a dynamic game difficulty way, I think you'll be doing a disservice to the experience by kind of suggesting there's an alternative 'proper way' of playing it... And it kind of undermines the whole shmup fantasy of a single ship vs so many enemies if all you need to do is spam the super-3-shot...


... With the 3 weapon colors you could also dress it up slightly differently with color tints and relating the weapons to say bullets, explosives, lasers etc... So like all weapons would damage but the correct weapon choice would damage better ... Perhaps there could also be a pattern effect to this - eg. bullets spread, explosives slow rate of fire but homing and good damage, lasers concetrate? But if in doubt just stick to the same pattern and simple fact that one vs right target does more damage.

[mystran]

There is a problem if you reset the multiplier if you fail. The game becomes too strict and it may become frustrating to a lot of people who don't want to sit through hours and hours just to perfect completely the stages. Instead, why not making the multiplier decrease if you shoot with the wrong colour? that would make the scoring more forgiving and make people more interested in scoring.

While that's "less strict" for sure, it's important to realize that even a simple "Futari original style" (at least in the abstract sense) system is somewhat stricter than it might initially appear, especially without something like a per-stage limit: assuming no limits (or counter-stops, careful with these kinds of systems) and a simple linear multiplier that grows per item (or some other condition, but I'll call it "item" anyway) then this "item" is essentially worth ( baseValue + rest * addMult ) where baseValue is the nominal score value of the item, addMult is the multiplier increase that you get, and rest is (informally) "all the nominal 'base value' score you collect after collecting this item, without losing the multiplier" .. which means that even WITHOUT any "decay" this system will significantly impact your total score for any item you don't collect (since rest*addMult is typically huge compared to baseValue): in early game you don't get the multiplier increase (and hence dilute all your later score) while in later game you fail to "cash in" on the multiplier (and mid-game a bit of both). It can be quite beautiful system, especially when "collecting everything" is made practically impossible (say in Futari it's somewhat unlike that you kill every single popcorn enemy with the right shot-type and never let any gems fall off-screen; if such "perfect play" was the "expected situation", then the "strictness" of the system would be much more obvious.. imagine a low-density medal-collection system with unbounded multiplier gain to see what I mean).

For the exact math you'd need the details, and one can adjust away from linear multiplier to fine-tune how much to penalize the player and I don't even know what Futari does with the gem-counts exactly (though it appears to give roughly similar results to this simple system), but the point is, if a scoring system allows an "uncapped" multiplier (if you cap it, then you relax the system to "simple scoring" as long as the player can maintain the cap) to be built over the full game (or significant parts like "full stage") then simply "failing to collect" (and hence "growing the multiplier slower") can become a fairly significant penalty on it's own, even if you don't otherwise directly penalize the player at all.

In slightly more formal terms (but without funny symbols), your total score is the integral of your "score gain rate" while in the linear multiplier system your "score gain rate" itself is an integral of the multiplier gain rate and assuming (for simplicity) the score/multiplier gain rates in such a system are roughly constants (over a single game), then in the "simple accumulation" system linear improvement in score gain rate gives quadratic effect in score, while in the "linear multiplier accumulation" model you get (for linear improvement in multiplier gain rate and no-more-than-linear improvements in "cash in" rate) a cubic effect in score (noting that in a typical game, after a certain point any improvement are likely to be quantitatively very small, which is why amplifying them with such a fast-growing function makes sense in the first place.. and when the "small improvements" assumptions fail, you often end up with counter-stops).

Thinking this way, it's easy to see how a single reset to the multiplier will essentially mean that your score is basically done (unless it is expected that everyone has a significant number of such resets). In fact even death doesn't completely reset your counter in Futari yet even the one-third reduction (in 1.5.. is it the same in BL?) still means there's a large "indirect" no-miss bonus. You can compensate with an increasing multiplier-gain curve over time (meaning you can attempt to de-emphasize the early stages by allowing faster multiplier gain later in the game).

That said, some weird people seem to like DoDonPachi style "chain the whole thing" designs, but I still think it's important to realize that if you allow multiplier accumulation over long periods of time, then simply "failing to grow the multiplier" is already a significant score penalty on it's own and your scoring system might be fine without any additional "artificial" penalty (at least assuming NBNM).

Oh and sorry for the horribly messy post.. hopefully some parts make sense.

[Mloren]

Thanks for all that feedback, it's given us a lot to think about

[Ixmucane2]

Shooting multiple weapons is going to be bad because hitting enemies with the wrong colour of bullet is unavoidable, leading to broken chains; which either matter only for score, i.e. not at all, or for weapon upgrades as mentioned in the OP, i.e. too much.

An alternative idea: matching bullets heal enemies, bullets of other colours hurt them. If all three weapons have the same raw power and healing is more than twice damage, using multiple weapons is only a way to prioritize enemies (e.g. I shoot red and blue to kill green quickly, then I'll switch to shooting green to kill the rest).

Another important aspect: different weapon shapes to let the player shoot multiple colours effectively, e.g. red ahead aiming at a green and blue miniboss and green very wide to kill red popcorn coming from the sides (accepting ). You could do something unusual: rotate between different distribution shapes for the same colour of bullets every time the button is pressed.