Limiting "point blank" effectiveness

[Numnomnum]

Hello there,

I'm new to this forum but not new to development. I've been working on a side-scrolling shmup for a few months now, and I've encountered an issue with the player's growth over the course of the stage; there's a huge disparity between the lowest-level and highest-level firing effectiveness in point blank range, which means that either my bosses take forever to die if the player hasn't been playing too well, or die way too quick if they're upgraded.

Now for several months, my fix is to reduce damage and explosion sprite size by 1/2, if the damage taken is while the boss is in "damaged" frames. I don't want to dissuade players from exploiting point blank range, because I think if a player can get into that range on most bosses they should be rewarded, but it is far too effective in some cases.

Now this fix works fairly well, but I'm not sure if this is something frowned upon by experienced gamers. Is there an "accepted" method of this kind of thing?

[Giest118]

What is it about point-blanking that results in more damage? Is it like the DoDonPachi laser aura where you do 2x damage if you get right on top of something, or is it one of those "closer means you fire faster due to less shots on the screen" deals?

[trap15]

Make it harder to get into a pointblank range seems like a pretty logical solution.

[BPzeBanshee]

What is it about point-blanking that results in more damage? Is it like the DoDonPachi laser aura where you do 2x damage if you get right on top of something, or is it one of those "closer means you fire faster due to less shots on the screen" deals?

One of the problems I had with Arxtyan in GMOSSE prior to its removal was rather simple: it was a wide shot, so the closer you were the more shots hit the enemy.If you are using a wide shot one could make separate 'bullets' with different damage values, which I did with Arxtyan (although it had several other issues so it got scrapped anyway).

As trap15 said however, making the point-blank area difficult to reach is the most logical solution. Hell, the Technical Bonus in Strikers 1999 is all about the bosses making point-blanking a means for the skilled player and no less.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

there's a huge disparity between the lowest-level and highest-level firing effectiveness in point blank range

This suggests to me that your ship only has one 'main' shot type? You haven't really explained what type of weapon that's causing the problem, so I assume it's either a spread shot based weapon or a limited shots on screen weapon.

Shmups like Gradius and whatnot get their pointblank effectiveness from how many onscreen shots you have being limited. At pointblank, as soon as you fire the shot hits, so the limitation is removed, but generally Konami makes their games actually reward this sort of play. The best way to fix that would be to make it so the weapon fires at a constant rate without a limit on the number of shots onscreen and design the damage output like that.

Spreadshot weapons nowadays are limited in damage by usually being the 'sub' weapon (i.e. in a game with a shot/laser system like Dodonpachi). You've got a thinner powerful weapon intended for bosses, and a weapon that's got more spread but is weaker (usually it's at best as strong as the laser when pointblank, laser does 2-3x more at long range in some cases like Futari). There's also a case like Imperishable Night where Yuyuko has a spreadshot that's her main weapon, and you are supposed to take advantage of pointblanking when possible if you're playing her solo, but despite her weapon filling the screen, the butterflies she fires in front do roughly 70%-80% of the total damage potential. The side butterflies (that are coloured more pale) help with popcorn, but don't have that much oomph, and do significantly less damage to bosses.

If you're having trouble with a spreadshot killing bosses too quick, try making the angled shots noticeably less powerful so that you need to get the forward firing shots hitting to do damage to bosses. Getting closer will increase the damage, but not by as much as if each shot did the same damage.

A lot of newer shmups actually don't have that much of an increase in damage at the highest powerup level vs the lowest, the powerups are more to increase the width/spread of your weapon more than anything, and they generally design their stages/bosses under the assumption that you're at or near the max power level. There's even some shmups that don't bother with power levels or powerups - you pick a shot type and it's at the same power level the whole game (DFK, SDOJ, SSS).

[Numnomnum]

Wow, wasn't expecting so many helpful replies in a short amount of time, thanks!

This suggests to me that your ship only has one 'main' shot type? You haven't really explained what type of weapon that's causing the problem, so I assume it's either a spread shot based weapon or a limited shots on screen weapon.

It's a spread shot type weapon and at the moment all indivudial bullets deal the same damage, though after reading through this thread it certainly makes sense to change that!

At the moment my powerups are very simple, so I'm going to consider removing them completely and coming up with something with less of a damage spike (though that's a lot of work). Even though I've played a fair amount of Touhou I ended up dropping back to games like Gynoug when looking at powerups, and it's been quite a source of problems when designing stages.

Due to this being on touch screen devices I didn't want to use an onscreen button for changing the firing type, which has made things a little more difficult so far.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

Due to this being on touch screen devices I didn't want to use an onscreen button for changing the firing type, which has made things a little more difficult so far.

I agree this is probably the way to go. Dodonpachi Maximum is by far my favourite of Cave's iOS offerings, mostly because the controls allow you to focus on dodging. Even in simpler games like Futari or DOJ (Blissful Death), trying to tap the shot change (which you will do a ton of in Futari to score) or bomb button at times is annoying. Very much like the one finger movement, two fingers activates bomb setup.

DFK (DDP Resurrection) is nearly unplayable in arcade mode with all the onscreen virtual buttons, I find it way too much of a pain compared to the Xbox version with a stick and buttons making it so much easier to control your hypers, bombs etc.

DDP Max actually has an interesting way of doing multiple shot types without a shot change. The cat character (a reference to Dangun Feveron/Uo Poko) fires a wide, dense spread attack whenever you're moving even slightly, but as soon as you stop moving it fires a stronger beam attack which helps for bosses. Basically, in stages you can make minimal movements to use the spread and lift your finger up when you get in front of an enemy you want to attack with the stronger move for a few seconds. It works surprisingly well (the other shot types in the game all have only one firing mode) even though the design means you can't use the laser when moving, so you learn to adapt by using it in short bursts and finding safe moments to stop moving.

[Numnomnum]

I've just finished making a few changes: massively reduced the damage of the 'additional' bullets on either side, and simply started the player with them instead of having a powerup for them. It definitely feels more fluid during the slow start of the stages, and the player essentially gets *2 damage instead of *5 damage for point-blanking. It seems like that solves a lot of the issues I was having with boss duration, actually. Thanks for your input!

[nasty_wolverine]

Can we actually see what you are working on?

[Numnomnum]

I'll post a few screenshots up in a day or two, there's a few placeholder assets I want to replace that spoil the look otherwise!

[Numnomnum]

Just for the record I haven't forgotten I'm supposed to be posting up images, I'm just still unhappy with the current WIP graphics.