I like stages that stand out as a survival challenge or as a scoring opportunity though.Despatche wrote:Stages should be around the same length. There should never be a focus on any particular stage, all stages should be designed with the others in mind.
For raw length, you could have each stage get slightly longer, or have the first and last stages be slightly shorter than the ones in the middle. The first and last stages shouldn't be incredibly short nor incredibly long, too many games do one or the other.
Tatsujin has pretty good stage length. Tatsujin Ou's stages are too long, but at least they're interesting, putting it well above the vast majority of shmups. A game with even slightly more variety than Tatsujin Ou would be a top 10 until the end times.
In Battle Bakraid the stages give around 10-15 million points on average, Naval has a very unique feel when it gives about 25 million and is slightly longer, without really unbalancing the game.
It's what you put in the stages combined with the length that matters, and not the length alone.
Some kind of spike in difficulty or scoring capability that isn't ridiculous is what makes stages memorable, not that each stage was 5% longer than the last, 5% tougher and had 5% more score, even if that seems like perfect balance on paper.