Which shmup killed "shmups"

[trap15]

Squire: Only skimmed your post due to length, but it looks good. Will be reading in-depth later and probably will refer people to this (and probably reference it myself in various ways). I appreciate the effort you have made.

[Muchi Muchi Spork]

I didn't read it other than the font size 1 million text and from that I couldn't disagree more. One of the great things about danmaku is the way it makes it feel so difficult yet be achievable. If I had to share that victory, well fuck that. That would take everything that makes you feel like a king away from it. Co-op is for shmup queens.

[iconoclast]

Crimzon Clover is an anomaly. It's polished, packed with content, and has top notch presentation because one guy spent what, five or six years creating it? It's a passion project that he made in his spare time; I seriously doubt he was relying on the money he made from the game to pay his bills. A development time like that is absurd for a professional studio and could never be sustained. Just read any Cave interview where their schedule is mentioned - they're always complaining about how quickly they need to get their games out. The company has to pay these guys x amount of dollars every year to create games, so they're expected to complete them in a reasonable amount of time and make money. That isn't going to happen if they sell them for the price of a McDonald's value meal.

It's different for doujin developers. I'm sure the guys who made those games never expected to make much money in the first place, so they're more willing to sell their work for <$10 and get whatever they can from it. If you look at professional arcade developers who have released cheap downloadable games, pretty much all of them have failed: Guwange (which made Cave decide to cancel their finished (?) Dangun Feveron port), Strania (Grev lost money), Hard Corps: Uprising (I don't think Konami/ASW has ever mentioned how this game sold, but the lack of a followup says enough), Bangai-O HD, Omega Five, Sine Mora, Trouble Witches (presumably), and I dunno what else. XBL Games on Demand and PSN releases of retail games never seem to do well either.

Ikaruga might be the lone exception, but that's a game that has had over a decade of hype from every corner of the Internet. No other developer has even half as much mainstream clout as Treasure.

[chum]

Shmups are too much memo for this generation of gamers, people love surprises! I'd like to imagine that the next 2hu phantasmagoria, if released online with good multiplayer, could revive shmups!

They aren't any more memo than Bayonetta or Dark Souls. All you really have to do is include some random variables on bullet patterns or boss patterns (like Batrider or Touhou) and you have enough surprises to last till judgement day.

Sorry to nitpick but the patterns in Batrider are almost never random. Many bosses will pick randomly between a set amount of static/aimed bullet patterns and that's where the random factor kicks in (that and movement). The randomization of patterns gives a lot more longevity than just hoping a boss uses the right patterns.

Thoughtful post

You have a way with words and you've swayed my heart

[Stilghar]

Mentioning the Raiden Series was spot-on. For instance; I'm still fairly new to the shmup genre as far as "really getting into it". I've only been really into shmups for the last 2 years; and I enjoy nearly all eras and sub-genres in it. I have 4-7 friends over about every month or two to play shmups. These guys range from heavy gamers who don't play shmups to "average" gamers who don't even know what shmups were. I'm slowly getting all of them hooked on the genre however.

1. They all dig Raiden Fighters and Ikaruga.
2. They all dig the older gen shmups like Gunhed, Lords of Thunder, MUSHA, Life Force, even SkyShark. We spent over 4 hours just playing Skyshark one night; I did not expect that.
3. They all like the Gradius games; again surprising to me based on how difficult they are...they mostly prefer Gradius III and IV over V....again surprising to me based on how unforgiving III is and how much it kicks you in the balls....but they love it.
4. They like the 1940 series but especially Strikers 1945II. Good taste. They also like 19XX a lot.
5. They tolerate Radiant Silvergun and it's slowly growing on some of them; but they don't prefer it. They really like Battle Garegga and it's often requested even though they cuss the bullets.
6. They love the visuals and bosses on Sine Mora but it's too hard for them and has almost no replayability once they've seen the game's entirety.
7. They don't like any of the Cave games at all; except Deathsmiles a little. I really thought they'd did AK at least; but nope. One of the guys does kinda like Guwange; but mostly because of the cat-spider boss.
8. They really love playing Raiden Fighters, Ikaruga, the Strikers and 1940's games, and space shooters in general. Except DoDonPachii
9. They don't like R-Type that much; too slow and difficult they say.

I'd say number's 6 and 7 are the most telling of why shmups are not doing so well overall...Cave lacks mass appeal and no one has figured out how to make a good all-around and accessible shmup in quite some time.

Totally off-topic:

As a developer, working on a commercial shmup this information is of great value! Thanks! Would you like to help beta test our game and future versions with your friends? Let me know.

[Squire Grooktook]

Squire: Only skimmed your post due to length, but it looks good. Will be reading in-depth later and probably will refer people to this (and probably reference it myself in various ways). I appreciate the effort you have made.

Thank you

I didn't read it other than the font size 1 million text and from that I couldn't disagree more. One of the great things about danmaku is the way it makes it feel so difficult yet be achievable. If I had to share that victory, well fuck that. That would take everything that makes you feel like a king away from it. Co-op is for shmup queens.

First off, I'm more thinking about what would appeal to other action game fans, not you and I the hardcore Cave fans. Having an extra arrange mode that is completely optional there for people who are interested in that type of gameplay and to widen the genre appeal shouldn't really effect you and your enjoyment of the main single player experience in any way.

Also are you sure you would really feel that way? I'd recommend trying it if you haven't. The co op experiences I've had felt no less exciting or rewarding. It may not have the "you against the world" feel, but it does have "you and me against the world" which is very compelling and satisfying in its own right. A sense of achievement shouldn't really be an issue anyway if the dodging and shooting is challenging enough anyway (2 people against a galaxy of aliens is still a pretty big underdog story).

Crimzon Clover is an anomaly. It's polished, packed with content, and has top notch presentation because one guy spent what, five or six years creating it?

Yes, but that's what makes the game appealing to us, not to others. I believe the reason I've seen non shmup fans buy the game is because

-Decent presentation (this could be achieved with just clever/creative art direction and not just fancy pre rendered graphics)
-Fun (could apply to a lot of shmups, not just those with CC's polish)
-Cheap
-Easy to purchase
-Good reputation (fans made an effort to spread the word)
-Some concessions to more casual players (novice mode etc.)

As far as I know, these aren't things that necessarily cost billions of dollars or 6 years of development time. They might, depending on how you go about it, but far more niche indie games have done far more expensive projects and done just fine as far as I know.

I think a good example of what shmups should aim for is Jamestown: Unique art direction and solid pixel art (probably less expensive than any of Cave's pre-rendered stuff or Grevs fancy 3d modeling?), concessions to the mainstream, fairly cheap, and solid game design. As far as I know the game has done fairly decent for an indie title, and the fact that they're doing an expanded ps4 port with additional content seems to confirm this.

-I seriously doubt he was relying on the money he made from the game to pay his bills. A development time like that is absurd for a professional studio and could never be sustained. Just read any Cave interview where their schedule is mentioned - they're always complaining about how quickly they need to get their games out. The company has to pay these guys x amount of dollars every year to create games, so they're expected to complete them in a reasonable amount of time and make money. That isn't going to happen if they sell them for the price of a McDonald's value meal.

It's different for doujin developers. I'm sure the guys who made those games never expected to make much money in the first place, so they're more willing to sell their work for <$10 and get whatever they can from it. If you look at professional arcade developers who have released cheap downloadable games, pretty much all of them have failed: Guwange (which made Cave decide to cancel their finished (?) Dangun Feveron port), Strania (Grev lost money), Hard Corps: Uprising (I don't think Konami/ASW has ever mentioned how this game sold, but the lack of a followup says enough), Bangai-O HD, Omega Five, Sine Mora, Trouble Witches (presumably), and I dunno what else. XBL Games on Demand and PSN releases of retail games never seem to do well either.

Honestly, I do believe that shmups on consoles will never be remotely profitable except in very special circumstances, and that big professional developers like Cave are not long for this world (in fact, I'd be willing to argue that any company that tries to specialize in a niche genre or any genre nearly exclusively is bound to struggle). I personally do believe that PC indie and doujin titles with solid but budget pixel art are the future.

Regardless, I do believe that there is no reason for shmups to be so dangerous an investment when games that are even more bizzare, niche, and have many of the same peculiarities as shmups can do better.

Shmups are too much memo for this generation of gamers, people love surprises! I'd like to imagine that the next 2hu phantasmagoria, if released online with good multiplayer, could revive shmups!

They aren't any more memo than Bayonetta or Dark Souls. All you really have to do is include some random variables on bullet patterns or boss patterns (like Batrider or Touhou) and you have enough surprises to last till judgement day.

Sorry to nitpick but the patterns in Batrider are almost never random. Many bosses will pick randomly between a set amount of static/aimed bullet patterns and that's where the random factor kicks in (that and movement). The randomization of patterns gives a lot more longevity than just hoping a boss uses the right patterns.

Subtle things like boss movement/positioning can make you do completely different dodges each time. Bashinet Mk2's movement + the random combinations in which he throws gernades or green discs can completely change the fight. I think there are a fair number of rng bullet sprays and such things (Boredom, Confricts spread is random I think, Envies direction changing lasers, etc.) though maybe not as many as their could be.

[bvzxa]

This titile makes no sense.

You should re-titile it
Shmups wern't killed, they just aren't mainstream here in the USA.

I'm glad it's not popular.

[Cagar]

I completely agree with everything that squire has said in this thread. I seriously sometimes just read your posts with my jaw open, smiling. It's amazing how close our views are
Shmup developers seem to miss ALL the points that are hot and required in the year 2014 to make and keep the player addicted.
The sad thing is, that these things could easily be added without taking anything away from the 'real way to play'.

Missing social aspects is probably the hugest and biggest problem of shmups.
Which is why so many shmup players are switching to fighting games, and why I'm making a game that attempts to mix the 2 genres

Of course, any of these problems don't exist in an arcade environment, but arcades being dead is another story.

This titile makes no sense.

You should re-titile it
Shmups wern't killed, they just aren't mainstream here in the USA.

I'm glad it's not popular.

Welcome.. i guess

EDIT: It's not any game that killed shmups. If anything, it's the (sadly, very common) mindset of players like Muchi Muchi Spork that killed them.

[Formless God]

I doubt anyone will think that SDOJ is better than DOJBL or that Double Dealing Character is better than Perfect Cherry Blossom.

I do. The only thing DOJBL had going on for it is the second loop and that is coincidentally what SDOJ plays like. With a bigger (read: better) hitbox, too.
And while 13, 14 and 14.3 are shittier games than PCB, the previous 8 games aren't. Both scoring and survival-wise.

[Cagar]

I doubt anyone will think that SDOJ is better than DOJBL or that Double Dealing Character is better than Perfect Cherry Blossom.

Wow I agree with both of these statements. (SDOJ > DOJBL, DDC > PCB)

[BareKnuckleRoo]

Yeah, I like SDOJ better too. The whole "choose your scantily clad pilot" is lame fanservice, but the actual shot type choices are far better and more interesting than in DOJ where Shotia is goddamn useless due to crawling movement speed when lasering, Type-B is too slow for when rank goes up massively due to hypering, particularly in the original, etc. All of the shot types in SDOJ feel genuinely useful and the game's hyper rank system feels more intuitive.

[Bananamatic]

Type B in DOJBL isn't that much slower, it's that you don't really need any more spread than A-EX has

sdoj would've been better than dojbl, but the input lag and the awful scoring system kills it for me

[Formless God]

Is it the chain interval or the cash-in

or maybe the overflow

[royalfan84]

Thanks Squire for taking the time to go into detail; I admittedly quick-read over most of it; will go back and read thoroughly though.

First of all, I agree with a majority of the issues you raised in relation to why shmups don't do well commercially in general these days. However when it comes to Cave or Bullet Hells overall; there are other factors that come into play that I've noticed. For instance; the friends I have over to play range from mediocre to hardcore when it comes to gaming- they're a small mix of range when it comes to gaming. None of them are solely CoD commercial gamers and none are turned off by the DIFFICULTY of games.

It's more than just the difficulty or even the complication of game mechanics. When it comes to cave I've noticed them griping about how they all feel the same...and even though the bullet patters are varied in size, speed, layers, etc it is still a game full of only(mostly) pink and blue bullets coming at you stage after stage. The design's of enemies and bosses is interesting and appealing; but the only variety of attack is the same. It's just not as fun for some people. Dodging vibrant colored bullets over and over again just isn't as appealing as dodging missiles, bullets, lasers, etc...it's not just Cave u could say the same about Ikaruga but the polarity mechanic saves it in that regard.

I mean Garegga, Bakraid, APB are no walk in the park difficulty-wise; but they are much more enjoyable and appealing to my friends. Maybe it's a mix of variety, gameplay, and aesthetics idk for sure. They also love Gradius; there is just multiple aspects of Cave shooters that aren't appealing to some.

Now I'm not bashing Cave; I own several Cave games and enjoy most of them. They do seem a bit redundant to me though on several levels. I think there is still a place for shmups on the gaming scene in the west; I just feel like to be successful here they cannot follow Cave's blueprint. To be fair, it's not the fault of Cave that they are putting out a majority of the shmups recently; I'm glad they have.

I must also admit I can understand shmup developers not caring to cater to the west; for I agree the U.S. Marketing scene has had a lot to do with the downfall of the shmup. Hopefully some new developers latch onto something great; or some veteran companies re-invent themselves without selling out.

[Bananamatic]

Not a big fan of the hyper recharge mechanic at all to begin with which is even in 1.5, making the game less about chaining(which is really easy in this game) and more about the recharges

Then you have the part where the arcade game is a glitchy mess where the proper way to score is to not score in the first 4 stages and the fixed version only made it as a console arrange, making it get way less attention instead of people moving to 1.5 like in DFK and Futari

It's still fun enough to play for survival, with Hibachi and Expert being reasonable yet still difficult clears, but I'm not touching the scoring with a 10 foot pole

[Formless God]

Fair point. I'm not a fan either because it's a just matter of memorizing the key spots. I greatly prefer the chaining though because it feels more like "I saw the enemy coming, got him and kept my chain" than "I memorized the entire stage and kept my chain". With DOJ's first loop I don't even feel like I'm playing until I've finished memorizing.

[Skykid]

To rebutt all of the fanservice people here: I think that fanservice is a symptom, not a cause of the decline of shmups. The way I look at it is like so: of all the game genres out there, a shmup is probably the easiest type of game to program, but one of the hardest to do well. Part of the reason it is hard to do well is because of the first point: you have to be fucking EXCEPTIONAL to stick out from the masses of shmups that are all shoddy clones of each other. And, moreover, it's not enough to just have a novel scoring mechanic or something, because since these games are so easy to write, almost anything you can think of has been done before. There's really just no low-hanging fruit in the genre from a developers perspective. Moreover, the audience for shmups, in addition to being small and thus non-lucrative, is also mostly comprised of hardcore gamers who really emphasize personal improvement to the max. Thus, in order to write a game that these types of people will laud, you have to understand the genre to great depth, you have to have played several types of shmups at a very high level and understand how every little detail of any scoring mechanic you come up with will be used and abused in high level play, and stuff like that. It's clear how fanservice can be used to help your yet-another-traditional-shmup stand out from the crowd: post images of a generic cute anime girl on the internet, have weeaboos fall in love with her, and they'll play your game. I really don't think that the existence of fanservicy art actually actively keeps people away from shmups in a statistically significant way.

Also, because KAI is an idiot:

Definitely 2hu.

It's fucking pedo. Lolicon fanservice is probably the most disgusting kind of thing someone could do. And they just went and did it.

If you've ever actually played a fucking touhou game, you would know that the girls present in the series are one of frankly very few examples of females in games that aren't sexualized at all. Many artists choose to make fan-depictions of touhou characters as young-ish, because ZUN doesn't know how to draw boobs and thus in all of the official art the girls are flat, but none of the imagery or dialogue in-game ever appeals to childish-moe, and most of the characters with canon ages are really quite old. But the age issue is kind of besides the point. You don't play touhou games because your favorite loli waifu has such beautiful eyes, or you like looking at yuyuko's boobs, or because aya's belly skin is so perfectly erotic, becaues none of that stuff is in the games. Like, right now, go find some official art of reimu and compare it to any of the generic moe anime girls from, i dunno, sai dai ojou or something, and my point will be made strikingly clear. Personally, the reason I find that (at least the early) touhou games are so popular is because it has the feeling of a passion project: it's made by a shmups fan with a creative imagination who really took the time to flesh out his world just the way he wanted it to be, without being particularly concerned with the size of his audience or pushing a political agenda or appealing to some trendy cultural perception of artsiness. Whether you're just going for a first 1cc, a difficult survival goal, or delving deep into the scoring system of a game, it always feels solid and engaging because ZUN gave a lot of shits about how the player experience should feel at many levels of play. I've spent a liittle bit of time thinking about score system design myself since I've been recently working on writing my own shmup, and the more I look at the systems present in the various Touhou games, the more I am amazed at how almost every detail is very elegantly solving a particular design problem.

I know the op of this thread said he didn't want to accept an answer that claims it's just cultural, but I think that the cultural aspect is inevitably a huge part of the decline of popularity of shmup development. I've talked to a couple of indie game devs whose opinions on shmups were basically "the programming is easy, you just have to spend a lot of time or money getting good graphics," which is very antithetical to the way most indie game dev shops are run (see all those half-assed pixel art or online-flash-game-style cartoony things; not to say those styles can't be done well, but oftentimes they're just used as a cop out to save time on graphics). With that kind of reputation, you'll never see a deep shmup like touhou or any other shmup that you may personally love coming out of an indie shop, because the things you love about the genre just aren't seen by most indie developers. The other thing is, there's definitely this pretention in the indie game dev community about being artsy, which for many devs means nothing more than "pushing the boundaries of what can be considered a game", whereas the shmups community has almost the opposite pretention of their games really being about nothing but the gameplay and personal improvement. These shouldn't be mutually exclusive, but in practice many people think of them as being so, because "being about nothing but the gameplay" means writing a game that's primarily about dodging bullets with a non-intrusive scoring system thrown on top for the advanced players, which leads to very traditional sort of games. I personally believe that there are lots of emergent properties of the shmup genre that can and should be exploited in artsy-type concept games or whatever, even basic things like the number of times you have to play a pattern to learn it, the way you develop a sort of tunnel-vision when assaulted by a dense bullet pattern, whatever, but it takes a lot more finesse to shoehorn some broader thesis into these kinds of phenomena.

This fucking guy.

[Erppo]

I greatly prefer the chaining though because it feels more like "I saw the enemy coming, got him and kept my chain" than "I memorized the entire stage and kept my chain"

That just means it's way too easy. If S/L is compared to the first loop in DOJ, I fully chained everything in SDOJ pretty soon after getting the game. I still haven't done that in the first loop of DOJ. Of course the real scoring difficulty of SDOJ lies in different things, but they don't feel as rewarding or interesting (and basically only exist in stage 5).

[Formless God]

It is too easy, yes, but I don't think DOJ's first loop's scoring is at all rewarding or interesting either. Since there is so little room for deviation you have no choice but to straight up memorize everything, and you need to grind and keep coming back every once in a while to get it to stick. Adding the fact that I can do the survival part with my eyes closed, the whole loop is just a chore. An overly generous chaining window is the lesser evil.

[Obiwanshinobi]

Sometimes I feel like asking how many dudes played any co-op shmup.
Could shmups really work online, though? Without altering the gameplay (input lag, extra slowdown).

[Lilium]

Wow there's actually people who prefer SDOJ? I'm genuinely surprised about that to be honest. Well sure, to each their own i suppose. Just couldn't get over things like annoying input delay, slowdown to the max in Expert mode and how bad the scoring is (lesser concern). No bomb bonus? That chaining? Pls...

The only good thing about imo is that it looks and sounds better than SDOJ which does certainly count for something.

This fucking guy.

is a genius!

[Cagar]

It is too easy, yes, but I don't think DOJ's first loop's scoring is at all rewarding or interesting either. Since there is so little room for deviation you have no choice but to straight up memorize everything, and you need to grind and keep coming back every once in a while to get it to stick. Adding the fact that I can do the survival part with my eyes closed, the whole loop is just a chore. An overly generous chaining window is the lesser evil.

Yeah I've never felt that DonDonpachi scoring is even fitting for a shoot em' up. It's just too heavily memo-based, and not only that: it's memo or nothing.
I'd take SDOJ chaining over DDP chaining any day, even if the game had no other scoring mechanics. So essentially it would come down to just attempting to kill every enemy possible. I'm not a fan of having to compliment my own label, but I'd say that TW3R:CL has ideal chain timings. It's pretty much between DOJ and SDOJ, so you can lose the chain if you have to focus on dodging too much, but you never have to memorize a chaining route.

[Never_Scurred]

What shmup killed "shmups"?

The shitty PS2 port of Ibara and the fact that Cave died before they could give us a proper port for the 360.

[KAI]

Shitty port has the arrange mode tho...

[Erppo]

It is too easy, yes, but I don't think DOJ's first loop's scoring is at all rewarding or interesting either. Since there is so little room for deviation you have no choice but to straight up memorize everything, and you need to grind and keep coming back every once in a while to get it to stick. Adding the fact that I can do the survival part with my eyes closed, the whole loop is just a chore. An overly generous chaining window is the lesser evil.

I don't understand how nothing to do would be better than something challenging to do. In any case you are going to need the same levels of precision to score well in SDOJ stage 5 (and every other difficult shmup stage ever). The other stages will go by autopilot since there really isn't much you can do that really matters, and to limit you even further, you will need rank 0 for stage 5 or you actually end up losing score.

[Formless God]

But is that something challenging fun to do? I guess this is subjective, but I consider forced memorization the most brute and inelegant way to design a challenge. I am fully aware that all shooting games require memorization to an extent, but not to the point of turning the game into an exam note.

And of course there is something to do in SDOJ: a harder survival game. When the scoring is also a mess like you pointed out, that's the next natural thing to consider.

[Erppo]

But is that something challenging fun to do? I guess this is subjective, but I consider forced memorization the most brute and inelegant way to design a challenge. I am fully aware that all shooting games require memorization to an extent, but not to the point of turning the game into an exam note.

I don't see that learning stage routes in DOJ was any different experience from learning higher level scoring routes in any other shmup I have played. Except for the things you need to perform being more interesting than average.

And of course there is something to do in SDOJ: a harder survival game. When the scoring is also a mess like you pointed out, that's the next natural thing to consider.

Unless you're talking about EX here, I cannot see this. The S/L pattern difficulty doesn't differ that much from loop 1 DOJ and if you can do that without much resource use, you should be no-missing to stage 5 in SDOJ with little practice.

[Muchi Muchi Spork]

Also are you sure you would really feel that way? I'd recommend trying it if you haven't. The co op experiences I've had felt no less exciting or rewarding.

I have, but not since catching the...danmaku 1cc bug, I guess I will call it. I did have fun, but it was more like co-op in other genres and was not as exciting or rewarding as clearing a game on my own, not in the least bit. Even if you clear a game, what kind of record is that? You could have done 30% and the other guy did 70%, so how much is your record now worth?

Also I think if Cave would have concentrated more on a co-op mode then there would have been less time for the 1P mode and then the part of the game I care more about would have been not as good. And if it would have dragged the games more in that direction yet kept them alive, I'd rather have what we have now than twice as many games that were only half as good. It's only that they put every minute of production time they had into the 1P modes that they turned out as polished as they are.

You don't have to have integrated co-op to have social aspects in a game. Some of the most popular ios games don't.

[evil_ash_xero]

The genre has been losing popularity since the end of the 16 bit era.

No one shmup killed the genre.

[Casey120]

Don ☆ Paccin !