a greetings post

[Aru-san]

As for bullet visibility, just make them blink slightly, it really helps. (all Cave games do this)

Do they blink on and off all at the same time, or dependent on when they are fired? I cannot tell in dodonpachi YouTube videos, the quality is too low.

When I last played DoDonPachi, they were dependent on the time they were fired.

[Udderdude]

It is much more than just that. The speed of kill is only one multipier of the enemy score. Others are based on strength and attack, which are difficulty mode independent, and make sense across difficulty modes, thus making all scores compatible no matter what mode you are in.

Plus, the enemy kill multiplier in our game is better than in Raiden 3. There is no maximum score. I think Raiden 3 caps the multiplier at 2X. We don't. So if you have eight fighters killing the same enemy, you kill it 8x faster and get 8x the points (split evenly so you get the same points as you would if you killed it with only one player 1/8th as fast). Additional players do not "steal" score potential from you, nor do they give you extra potential.

Very cool and fair scoring system. It "just works", no matter the number of players, no matter the difficulty mode. It is fair and just in all cases.

Wouldn't it be a little difficult to coordinate all 8 players having shots on the enemy when it dies? Or is there some sort of timer that counts a player as hitting an enemy for a certian time? In any case, even with all that other stuff, it still sounds like Raiden 3.

You really ought to look at some of the scoring systems in modern CAVE games - they are far and away more complex. Not saying you have to make your own scoring system as complex .. but it's good to know.

Now I know what you mean. You want to be able to play DUAL PLAY on two controllers. Well you can already do this with any Xbox game, as with ours, but the game will think of you as two players and thus two scores. Combining of such scores will probably not be implemented in our game. Is this something we should concentrate on? It will greatly complicate our menu systems, and our introduction of DUAL PLAY to players who know nothing about it. Should we look more into this, or is DUAL PLAY on one controller good enough for now? With HRAP I do not see a right thumbstick, so maybe DUAL PLAY will be impossible on just one of them.

Yes, dual play with HRAPs would require two of them. Obviously most people won't be able to do this, I wouldn't consider it a priority if it's going to mess up your menu system or take too long to implement. It's just a cool idea.

The cap will be the difficulty mode that you cannot complete the game (or maybe just the first stage) in. It will be different for everyone. If we were to cap the difficulty modes, I cannot see why someone who can complete the game in the hardest mode should not be offered an additional mode to test out.

I can see what you're trying to do here, but all that will end up happening is that the player will never feel like he/she has truly "beaten" the game - it becomes some wierdo version of a 80's arcade game that loops infinitely. You can never actually win. It only keeps getting harder until the point where human reaction time can't possibly deal with it.

Why do you want a cap? Do you want the game to eventually "switch gears" and become more about perfecting the game play in the hardest mode, as opposed to trying to complete the hardest mode possible? I'm not sure which is better.

Yes, 99% of shmups out there are like this.

The reason we cannot have a cap is because of the eight fighters in 4x local multiplayer, all in DUAL PLAY, where the firepower just dominates any given level that can be beat in single player mode. We need additional modes of difficulty for this extreme gameplay. At least 5 or 6 more modes to get a eight player game that matches a single player game in difficulty. A cap at this point would be so high as to become meaningless to even have it.

I don't think I can stress enough just how much eight players can dominate a game that is even impossible to a single player. It was the reason, above all else, that we had to change the way we thought about our difficulty modes. We originally wanted a cap, too.

Why not just take the cap difficulty and multiply it by the number of players in the game? It doesn't really need to scale infinitely.

[Xonatron]

Why not just take the cap difficulty and multiply it by the number of players in the game? It doesn't really need to scale infinitely.

We thought of this, too, and rejected it for the following reason: We wanted mid-game joins, where additional players can enter the game at any point in time. This also simplified the menu, as there is no "multi-player" start, just "start", and all additional players join mid-game at the beginning of the game. Plus, we wanted to have stages that stayed the same difficulty while in multiplayer so players can see if more players can beat or dominate a given stage. We wanted the stages to be unchanged. We found that doubling a stage difficulty for two players actually makes the game HARDER than one player at half the difficulty. We found that two players are never double the power or effectiveness because they confuse each other, restrict each other's movements, draw enemy fire in random directions, etc. We liked what Contra had, a single game of set difficulty that you can attack with two players if you want, but the game remains unchanged.

I understand the "neverending" "never beat the game" feeling. I hope the additional modes do not give that feeling, as beating the game in "normal" should really be considered beating the game. I always wanted additional difficult modes in Super-C. I could beat the game with one life, without weapons, purposely firing the gun slowly at 2 times/second. There was nothing left, as I had become a true expert at the game. I wanted to have more modes (and 8 fighter modes) as ADDITIONS to the original game, without making it seem like the player has not accomplished the game. The psychology of it all, the feeling of not beating the game, is probably unavoidable.

I have found that making a game is give and take. You cannot have everything. Doing one thing removes another. It is all about balance. And balancing is very very hard. We are just guessing at how this will work. Hopefully we learn from our mistakes and Duality 2 (Zone of Fire 2?) will make up for them.

[nimitz]

great idea but theres a BIG problem.

I don't know if you have played many quality shoot'em ups from japan, but these games aimed at the best players need to be balanced from A to Z and that is a process that takes a big part of the developement time(That is for one difficulty level only).

Games like mushihime-sama(released by Cave the most respected producers of shootem ups on the market right now) have pushed the envelope by having 3 (three) diffuculty mode in that particular game and the head designer Tsuneki Ikeda said that making the bullet patterns for the last difficulty mode almost drove them crazy (because of the sheer amount of work involved)


The point is, there is no way to make a well balanced game for say 10 actual difficulty levels. What you can do though is build the game for the hardest possible difficulty level, you make sure this specific level is perfectly balanced and THEN you can tweak it to make the game easier by removing bullets and/or enemies. Any shoot'em up needs at lest one well-worked on and balanced setting so that players can track their progress and compare scores with other.

The usual way devs use to go around the fact that newer players cannot handle the insane difficulty of many modern shootem ups is to add risk-reward scoring systems. this way a newer player can cruise through the game with not so much trouble but at the same time the better players will find that maximizing their score is very hard because they have to save bombs, point-blank enemies, collect specific items without missing one, chain enemies, destroy specific parts of bosses that make them harder, choose the hardest route to an objective and so on.

[Xonatron]

Wouldn't it be a little difficult to coordinate all 8 players having shots on the enemy when it dies? Or is there some sort of timer that counts a player as hitting an enemy for a certian time? In any case, even with all that other stuff, it still sounds like Raiden 3.

Before I reply in ignorance, could you or anyone explain in explicit detail how Raiden 3's scoring system works?

[Aru-san]

Wouldn't it be a little difficult to coordinate all 8 players having shots on the enemy when it dies? Or is there some sort of timer that counts a player as hitting an enemy for a certian time? In any case, even with all that other stuff, it still sounds like Raiden 3.

Before I reply in ignorance, could you or anyone explain in explicit detail how Raiden 3's scoring system works?

Raiden 3's scoring system works like this (I think). An enemy comes on screen. If it's shot within a certain time limit (say about the moment it spawns into the screen), you get points with a 2x multipler. Over time, this multipler will go down in increments of 0.1x until the enemy is only worth 1x.

[Udderdude]

Wouldn't it be a little difficult to coordinate all 8 players having shots on the enemy when it dies? Or is there some sort of timer that counts a player as hitting an enemy for a certian time? In any case, even with all that other stuff, it still sounds like Raiden 3.

Before I reply in ignorance, could you or anyone explain in explicit detail how Raiden 3's scoring system works?

Raiden 3's scoring system works like this (I think). An enemy comes on screen. If it's shot within a certain time limit (say about the moment it spawns into the screen), you get points with a 2x multipler. Over time, this multipler will go down in increments of 0.1x until the enemy is only worth 1x.

Also the bigger an enemy is, the slower the multiplier will go down.

[Xonatron]

In case you missed it from the other thread, new screenshots of Duality: ZF:
http://xona.com/2009/03/31.html