gimmick shmup mechanic: deliberately creating slowdown

[Patashu]

I had a thought after watching Daikfukkatsu Arrange B. Past a certain point the number of bullets was so immense and the slowdown incredible that it became trivial to dodge. Traditionally this is because of hardware limitations, but what if a shmup was deliberately designed around giving you ways to bog down the hardware of the system and force slowdown to get through tricky attacks?

It would essentially be a satirical parody shmup, and I was wondering if it could be made to be worth playing.

Possible mechanisms:
-Instead of a bomb or in addition to it, a move that does nothing except create such spectacular flashiness and graphical effects (or even your own shmup-boss-level bullet spreads!) that it takes substantial processing effort to render.
-Enemies or friendlies with harmless or not-very-harmful or easy-to-dodge bullets/attacks, that you want to try and keep on screen and filling it so there's more slowdown.
-Bonuses/points/meters filled whenever you're in slowdown.
-Bullets that can be destroyed, or home, or otherwise react to the player, such that you can lure them on or off screen depending on how you cope them, changing how much slowdown there is.
-Weapons/bonuses/effects that create slowdown more explicitly instead of by proxy of overloading the hardware, i.e. a bomb that would cause all bullets around you to halve their speed or cause the screen to slow to crawling speed for a moment.

It would need to know how fast the frame rate was going and to artificially limit it to the expected level if your computer was faster than normal, for instance.

[snafusan]

Hello

I answered this one yesterday in another thread and gave some code (XNA based) examples of how I do it.

http://shmups.system11.org/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=33575

Timestepping your game properly allows you to do all sorts of funky slow motion effects. Definately do it and spend a month creating gimmicks that you later throw away after playing Dodonpachi again and realising where you've ended up - I did!

Good luck,
- Steve

[Drum]

I hope somebody dicking around with a similar idea didn't scare him off from going ahead with it. It's a pretty fertile area and there's plenty of room for lots of people!

snafusan: Out of curiosity, what made you decide to ditch your gimmicks? Did you find it was poisoning basic play or making scoring runs too frustrating?

[Despatche]

or you could just rip off espgaluda

[Drum]

Espgaluda, MEH. I liked his idea better - plus Omega Fighter & Astro Blaster >>>>>>> Espgaluda

[eiyukabe]

I like the idea of strategic slowdown, if for no other reason than I get owned at bullet hell games

I think the best way of doing it is to use an item or attack that slows down your time step instead of spawning a lot of graphical effects and hoping it's enough to bog down the user's computer. It could be interesting to have a shmup where you can slow the game down as often as you want and for as long as you want, but your score will be significantly reduced during these phases. This can lead to players setting their own challenge level dynamically as well as significant score diversity, two things I find desirable in shmups. I bet the feeling of going back through levels and shaving off seconds of slowdown as you become more and more familiar, watching your score increase each time, would be very fun.

[snafusan]

snafusan: Out of curiosity, what made you decide to ditch your gimmicks? Did you find it was poisoning basic play or making scoring runs too frustrating?

Hiya,

Sorry it's taken me a long time to respond. I have bursts of activity here and there..

In answer to your question - mostly the poisoning of basic play! I'm a massive Cave fanboy and they have a lot of fancy things in their games - Espgaluda has the complicated time slowdown system with varying levels of activation - DDP Daioujou has its great hyper mode system.. Daifukkatsu has (arguably not the best decision) bullet cancelling mechanics. Deathsmiles is basically on crack (and quite frankly so is Progear in that respect)

But one thing I've noticed in all of them and I think this is one of the things you can really lose sight of when you're developing a shmup is that they never ever lose sight of the fact that they are SHMUPS! Meaning the focus of the game is still, despite all the chaos on screen, to shoot the living crap out of everything coming your way and chain them together for combos if you're going for a high score.

So yes, I got lost in gimmicks for a while and they poisoned basic play. I'll finish the game by making it play exactly like one of my favourites first and then I think I'll re-engineer it. As you're probably aware though, it never helps when you're staring at your own project for so long because you start to see the flaws that the casual observer does not...*

Look at mushi - it's pretty ridiculous to the casual observe but beneath all the purple it has the basics - shoot things, snag powerups and score items while dodging all that's evil... and then it just adds all that "omgshedfromenemiesandswitchfiremodesandandandandandARGH!" on top to make things a little more interesting

Cheers,
- Steve




* Note, shmup players are not casual observers. Our eyes work 1000x faster than a normal human. Actual Fact.