monoRAIL wrote:
Modern/high-end games - Ikaruga, Sine Mora
Both of these are bad examples. Ikaruga isn't really modern anymore (It's 10 years old) and it's not a typical shmup, it's more of a (very strict) puzzle game.
Sine Mora looks pretty but has various flaws. I would show neither of these games as good examples of modern shmups.
Thanks everyone for the suggestions, sorry I don't have time to reply to you all individually, but I'll be taking a lot of this on board when I design the lecture.
With regard to inertia, we'll be prototyping with Unity, which by default has smoothing turned on for digital inputs. I'll show them how to fix this right at the start!
BulletMagnet - those articles are great, I'll make them required reading!
is there any chance you could share your materials (syllabus, reading list, assignments, slides, handouts etc.) for the course you're going to teach either on your blog, or in some other format?
is there any chance you could share your materials (syllabus, reading list, assignments, slides, handouts etc.) for the course you're going to teach either on your blog, or in some other format?
+1 to this...post the course materials up in the development forum!
As for my feedback, something which is always overlooked in newbie shmup development is sound. This is literally half the gaming experience, yet is always thrown in at the last minute with little thought as to how to do it correctly. Take a note from Pinball developers, where sound is a very important aspect to holding the players attention and signaling important scoring opportunities.
Dave_K. wrote:As for my feedback, something which is always overlooked in newbie shmup development is sound. This is literally half the gaming experience, yet is always thrown in at the last minute with little thought as to how to do it correctly. Take a note from Pinball developers, where sound is a very important aspect to holding the players attention and signaling important scoring opportunities.
I've noticed this problem with many doujin games as they all use the same freeware sound effects library (the one Platine Dispositif uses). It really stands out after you've played a few doujins.
Anyone reading this who is into sound design, please make up a new freeware sound library you'll be doing us all a big favor lol.
I'll post a link to the slides and the Unity projects once they're done.
As for sound, there is a separate sound design course as part of this games degree, so my class won't cover that specifically. I'll probably just show how to create some sounds in SFXR.
Dave_K. wrote:As for my feedback, something which is always overlooked in newbie shmup development is sound. This is literally half the gaming experience, yet is always thrown in at the last minute with little thought as to how to do it correctly. Take a note from Pinball developers, where sound is a very important aspect to holding the players attention and signaling important scoring opportunities.
I've noticed this problem with many doujin games as they all use the same freeware sound effects library (the one Platine Dispositif uses). It really stands out after you've played a few doujins.
Anyone reading this who is into sound design, please make up a new freeware sound library you'll be doing us all a big favor lol.
The libraries were actually created by an Astro Port member mind you but, yeah, they are used way too commonly in the huge majority of the doujin shmups, even Crimzon Clover uses them!
NOW REACHES THE FATAL ATTRACTION BE DESCRIBED AS "HELLSINKER". DECIDE DESTINATION.
TrevHead (TVR) wrote:
Anyone reading this who is into sound design, please make up a new freeware sound library you'll be doing us all a big favor lol.
I'd throw Viewpoint in for memorization.. also the isometric perspective makes it stand out too.
You could argue otherwise I guess...
Pitfalls, things like dead-end alleys in the said memorization games, I'm not really sure what's fun about choosing to go either left or right, then after a few screens of scrolling being presented with a solid brick wall on one of those paths.. which is something I distinctly remember in several euro games. If you can reverse, fine, if you can't?
Also Fantasy Zone? It's a shooter, but it's also kinda different with the objectives (like some arena shooters) If you're exploring sub-genres, and how you can do something other than a single direction 'blast everything to hell' then it's an interesting one.
Back to Euro-hate, maybe some of the SEUCK offering on the Amiga didn't help, PD libraries were filled with downright abysmal shooters thanks to that thing
Try to get them to think outside the box in regards to what features could draw in new fans without compromising the core gameplay that longtime fans love. Ginga Force is a great study in this imo.
Sine Mora would be a good choice of study as well, but keep an eye out for the things it does wrong in addition to what it does right. There's a good game under there, they just botched it up.
Went through the slides, looks like a nice presentation, with both theory and practice, I can't help nitpicking on the variable timestep a bit, but it's probably easier on beginners that way.
Dave_K. wrote:Take a note from Pinball developers, where sound is a very important aspect to holding the players attention and signaling important scoring opportunities.
You happen to have anything that goes deeper into this? I would like to know more.
ciox - good point. I guess you could use Application.targetFrameRate = 60; and then remove all the Time.DeltaTime factors, so that if the framerate drops below 60fps objects will really move slower rather than the game stuttering. I haven't looked into that because Unity generally gets great framerates on a PC, but for a mobile game this would be an important issue.
BPzeBanshee - Give it a try! Unity is free, and you can always prototype with images on planes if you don't have 3D modeling experience.
Nobody cares about Space Invaders, and especially not Xevious. You can print off the list of Shmups Firsts in one of the old threads here and be done with that.
Galaga, on the other hand, is actually a reasonably good game (better yet Galaga '88). Ditto the classic caravan shooters (Tekhan-influenced and Hudson-made).
What I think is important is to give an overview of the various kinds of mechanics possible. Namco loved their fixed-location bomb games and they are almost all the worse for that choice. I hate to harp on it, but it really feels like somebody said "let's introduce feeling of Real Flying and Bombing" and didn't pay much attention to making that tie into the actual game-playing part in that way. These have little importance to modern designs for this reason. Once you take away that mechanic all that's left is a bare-bones shooting game design, which will already be covered. If I had time I might gloss over this little withered branch of the evolutionary tree of shmup design, but only if I had time. It's much more important to look at some of the interesting systems that aren't immediately obvious and might be tricky to implement, or at least to give a familiarity with recent designs. Anybody can think, in a few seconds, "it would be interesting to drop a bomb like a real plane, omg." Don't see what's really important about covering that. Zaxxon is probably more interesting for games that attempt to give the feeling of real flying in a shooter, anyway! But the big story here is to learn what the audience wants - or at least know how to try to make it something the audience would want. People don't want Cave games all the time, but I also think they probably don't want Zaxxon, either.
Covering concepts like designing a good and balanced risk to reward ratio, on the other hand, gives something that can help provide that spark which makes a game fun but which is less obvious to the newbie in the genre. So too would be looking at ways to approach the design like Valve does with their games, using heat maps (for example) to try to learn from player testing and data-driven feedback for refining the design.
Okay, rant over - I'll have a look at the slides and I"m sure I'll learn something. Thanks for them.
Edit: On reading the slides - crediting Bangai-Oh with bullet grazing seems strange. Psyvariar came later, and is more refined in presenting what bullet grazing is about, without a lot of other mechanics obscuring what's going on. And credit belongs at least with the original Raiden Fighters, which came out years before either game.
I don't think the emphasis on creating a "unique" scoring system is the right direction, per my comments above; probably what is more important is getting the developer in the habit of combining subjective and objective analyses to find out what's fun. If somebody throws together a scoring system where the objective is outlandish, like only hitting enemies with every third shot (which, actually, is kind of like Space Invaders scoring), because their sole objective was to try and hurry and find something that hadn't been done before (keeping in mind that very few people actually know what has and hasn't been tried before), that's not going to impress people. It emphasizes "you can't use a good design again" instead of "you need to find something that works."
Ehi mate, do you know Luke McMillan at Quantum College, in Brisbane? He did a Ph.D. project on shmups, and lectures games design, among other subjects.
He posted adapted excerpts of his thisis on racketboy, too.
I hope that I am not too late with this suggestion.
"The only desire the Culture could not satisfy from within itself was one common to both the descendants of its original human stock and the machines [...]: the urge not to feel useless."
I don't see Xevious as a branch on the shmup tree, Ed, but the trunk. It was the direct inspiration for the development of Vulgus, Star Force, Thunder Force, Tiger Heli, and Gradius. Then Vulgus lead to the 1940-something games, and Star Force lead to Star Soldier and Caravan and Summer Carnival, and Tiger Heli lead to Toaplan's heyday and to Seibu and Cave, and Gradius lead to R-Type... Even a decade later, Xevious was a model for Taito in making RayForce. And of course, the game had successors at Namco, with Dragon Spirit becoming prominent in its own right.
The design of Xevious has major flaws, and I don't play the original anymore either, but I don't think any shooter's been more influential.
RegalSin wrote:You can't even drive across the country Naked anymore
In terms of teaching difficult lessons in shmup design, maybe Xevious is a good counter-example, for the reasons I mentioned. Just because it came early on doesn't excuse the badness of the bombing system, although what's more remarkable is that Namco persisted in trying to sell people on that shit mechanic for nigh on a decade.
In terms of the evolution of gaming systems, I think the bombing mechanic is clearly peripheral, although maybe that changes if people used it as a counter-example as mentioned before. Maybe it had some influence on Gradius, for example - I wouldn't know.
As a general prototypical scrolling shooter there's not a lot to be said. Namco were often ahead of the curve in hardware and they were able to put out things before other people. I think the genre was clearly already headed in the direction of the vertical shooter with a scrolling background.
There are two questions here: if Xevious should be part of teaching shooter history, and if Xevious should be part of teaching shooter development. The first was the one I had in mind when I answered monoRAIL, since he talked about "a crash course on the history of shmups" and "shmup origins" being part of his lesson plan, and the answer to that question is a definite yes.
I'm probably not qualified to answer the second... I've never developed a shooting game. My feeling, though, is that with shooter developers like Konami and Toaplan stating that they learned from Xevious, and with Xevious being very successful in both the US and Japan, there's more that can be learned from it than what not to do.
I'm a little surprised by the contempt for ground bombing. Like melee attacks or bullet reflecting, it's not something I'd like to see in the majority of shooters, but I think there've been a few good games based on such mechanics (Xevious Arrangement, Dragon Spirit, RayForce).
RegalSin wrote:You can't even drive across the country Naked anymore
Mortificator wrote:
I'm a little surprised by the contempt for ground bombing. Like melee attacks or bullet reflecting, it's not something I'd like to see in the majority of shooters, but I think there've been a few good games based on such mechanics (Xevious Arrangement, Dragon Spirit, RayForce).
Sounds a bit like vocal majority to me. I for one have never heard anything against ground bombing until Ed Oscuro showed up, so I'm inclined to say it's his personal opinion and should be treated as such.
I agree with you: RayForce did a fine job in that regard. And I do think it is definitely a part of shmup history.
RayForce is fine, but the mechanic is only tangentially related at that point - you don't have to be lined up at the precise moment you bomb anymore, it's much more forgiving (and useful). I do my best to tolerate Fighter & Attacker too. Yeah, I do remember the Gradius people - speaking of game series that have had trouble innovating on promising mechanics - mentioning that Xevious was out there:
At that time it was the golden age of Namco's Xevious, and everyone was driven by the enthusiastic sentiment that "If we're going to make a STG, let's surpass Xevious."
Xevious had used the Nazca Lines, and we were inspired by that.
So sure, you can talk about the inspiring power of ancient civilizations and crypto-archaeology if you think it's relevant to a game development or history class. In all seriousness it probably should be given some kind of historical and aesthetic context.
In the meantime I'll go check out all you guys' High Score thread submissions for other ground-bombing Namco games.
but, yeah, they are used way too commonly in the huge majority of the doujin shmups, even Crimzon Clover uses them!
