Nandeyanen!? The 1st Sûtra (Windows / XBLIG)

[Tafia Tchagata]

Greetings fellow shmupers!!

We are a small team of shmup swiss fans from the french-speaking region of Lausanne. A few years ago we decided to develop our own shmup. Our project, called Nandeyanen!? is meant as a homage to the Nec PC Engine "Long Nose Goblin" (1991): we kept the narrative drive (save the fox lady), the presence of mini-tengus as gameplay elements but toned down the Taito cute'em up aspect. Still, the gameplay will be closer to a modern danmaku rather than an old horizontal shooter. We also included a bullet counter system inspired from SFIII Third Strike. The game will be in English, Japanese and French. We will also start by launching only the 3 first stages.

A gameplay mechanics trailer is on the way and we only have screenshots to show but we would be honored to discuss this project further with you:

Tchagata Games is a creative hub of four persons living in the area of Lausanne, Switzerland. We are dedicated to the exploration of gaming, in whatever form or support. Our deep passion for the act of playing has led us to create our very own projects. We value dedication to imagination, spontaneity and madness. As a first step into the harsh and time-consuming world of video game design, this game was entirely financed by our stubbornness, naivety and friendship.













Game On!!

[BareKnuckleRoo]

The art looks pretty, but it's a shame the images you linked are scaled down so small that you can't see any of the details.

What are all the indicators beside the bomb/life meter? How's the shot system work?

[Tafia Tchagata]

You're right, here are some new screenshots in better quality!!

As for the mechanics:
HUD: Life / Bomb, the bomb is making you invincible and erasing bullets but no damage to the enemies, this is to force the players in using the following mechanics
In the HUD you see the faces of the 3 minitengus joining you in your fight. You can drop them while shooting and after 2sec they will fire a beam adding to your fire power. We also have shields that only their beams can break (starting from stage 2). Just as with the Epona carrot system in Ocarina of Time you can either use the 3 of them in a row and then you have to wait for 10sec before using them again or you can wait for their beam to shoot and they are ready to go again.

We also have a bullet counter system that you can see on one of the screenshots. When you hold the minitengu button an aura will deploy around you and every bullets coming in it can be countered (by pressing forward like in SF3 Third strike). We also have enemies with shields that can only be destroyed with countered bullets. If you keep using the aura for more than 10sec it will disappear and you will have to wait for the same cool down time as with the minitengus.

Thanks for your interest!!

[n0rtygames]

Well, this certainly looks pretty Hope it works out well!

One comment from me... Sorta had this happen myself in the past - dont you think the player sprite is maybe just a tad too big for the hitbox size?

imo (and this really is just my opinion - so take with a pinch of salt) - you should be able to play with no visible hitbox and still have it be intuitive. Not saying you should hide the hitbox - just that if you took the hitbox rendering out.. would it be as clear? For instance if you look at most top down verts, it's usually fairly obvious that your hitbox is somewhere around the cockpit and over time you'll get a feel for it.

Now the nagging is out of the way - the minitengu bullet cancelling sounds neat. Kinda deathsmiles - which is fine by me.

[n0rtygames]

Also damn you for putting parrying in your stg. That's on my todo list for a hori

[Tafia Tchagata]

You're so right n0rtygames, the hitbox size was a huge issue for us while making the game. Honestly, it was homemade to the point where we realized that the firing should come FROM the hitbox and not from the tengu's fingers like we did before (because it was way cooler). I do completely agree with you and this will be a problem for newcomers, especially since we are making a danmaku. We sort of realized after working on the tengu sprite why most horizontal shooters would logically have vertically inclined sprite (spaceship etc...). I guess we wanted so much for our game to be a mix between Cave, Treasure and PC engine shooters that we had to sacrifice the intuitive visuals (game design) you are talking about.

Also...sorry about the parrying system...honestly there's still a lot to do with the idea...

[n0rtygames]

I basically had to scale my sprites down when I was working on a hori (which still isn't even finished and likely to get a full redesign anyway) to solve this issue myself. It might be wise for you to think about doing the same.

Usually what I'll do is take a screenshot of an existing game at the proper resolution and a screenshot of my own game. Then scale the shot from my own game to match the game I'm trying to compare with. So long as I can draw a single rectangle that mostly covers the entirety of both sprites - the scales are good.



I think about 1.25x one of your little tengu dudes would be about the right size for the player sprite

[Tafia Tchagata]

That's a very strong point, no doubt about it... And your rectangle scale sure is convincing. Also, I'll talk about it with my artistic team (http://www.goshseiko.com/) and we will try to do something about it. The problem here is that we will have to rescale everything from the tengu, to the minitengus, the counter aura, etc...this should take us sometime rework it convincingly...but thanks a lot for the comment. This is typically the type of thing you cannot see anymore after working for so long on a project. My big problem right now is the tampering of difficulty...
And we will be working with our sound designer tonight trying to give a "flamethrower" feel to the laser beam.

Also there is one other gameplay mechanic that I haven't talked about:
In every stage, 5 enemies (one is always the halfboss) release, after you kill them, a "Siddham" drop (like a powerup). When you collect the complete 5 in one go, you release a special beam attack on the level boss for 30% lifebar damage. This system is to add a replay value but we are also thinking of making it a requirement to reach the 5th stage or the true final boss.

You can see one of these "Siddham" drops in the screenshot below



Cannot wait to show you our trailer n0rtygames and get your feedback!

As always thanks for the support!

[n0rtygames]

I suspect you can get away with adjusting far less than you think you need to. It really is just the player. Your tengu thingies don't really have to be small and relative to the player.

shmups are great like that - so long as something looks cool as fuck, you can suspend your disbelief. It's just the player sprite that is very large indeed. One of the reasons I'm not a fan of Gundemonium, I must be honest.

[Cagar]

I agree with n0rty here, about that not everything has to scale with the player (take akai katana for example)

[Lord Satori]

Interesting style there. Nice to see something different.

[Tafia Tchagata]

And it is here at last, our first teaser trailer of the game.
We kept it short but tried to show as much as possible the various gameplay mechanics.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ys7tz6En1kE

A huge inspiration was the Akai Katana Shin japanese trailer.

We are also starting a page on Facebook and will be posting more infos and pictures in the coming weeks:

https://www.facebook.com/tchagatagames

And we made an IndieDB page for the game:

http://www.indiedb.com/games/nandeyanen

As always, thanks for the comments and remarks and keep shooting!

[laxa88]

This looks really good! And I thought I was original for wanting to implement a similar "counter" system in the shmup I'm working on (I play SF3:3S too), but you're way ahead of me and you guys pulled of the concept pretty well... haha

Now that I've seen such a mechanic in play, I start to wonder -- do you think "counter" defeats the purpose of dodging bullets? I know there's penalty for using it too long, but if it's enough to always get you out of the toughest situations "for free" (as long as you don't over-use it).

Regardless, I'm actually looking forward to the game! Good luck.

[ciox]

Game looks nice at a first look, maybe the character is a little rigid, not sure.

Now that I've seen such a mechanic in play, I start to wonder -- do you think "counter" defeats the purpose of dodging bullets? I know there's penalty for using it too long, but if it's enough to always get you out of the toughest situations "for free" (as long as you don't over-use it).

Even if a bullet countering mechanic is strong the game can still do fine, there are many games where it takes longer to master the game's "counter" system than it would take to just learn the minimum effort required to dodge everything (Psyvariar).

That said the parrying looks a little easy to do just from seeing the video, a "true to form" parry would need you to tap once for each bullet, and if you tap when there is no bullet in range you are "punished" by being unable to parry for a period of time, this maxes out the skill component but doesn't mesh well with very large amounts of bullets.

[Tafia Tchagata]

Thanks a lot for the comments!

Honestly, the counter system was pretty harsh to include in the game flow and I perfectly understand your skepticism. The solutions we found to avoid the "too-easy" problem of the system are:
- It takes around 1 sec to have your counter aura fully deployed, so here anticipation and learning are the keys.
- You cannot shoot while countering and we have a lot of enemies coming at you making it more efficient to dodge and shoot
- You have to tap forward (Third Strike style) everytime a bullet enters your counter aura making it dangerous against huge waves of bullets
- You are limited by the number of times you can use it. If you exhaust your mini-tengus you hitbox turns violet (more hard to see) and you cannot use counter for 10 sec, which is very difficult especially from the Stage 3.
- Some enemies have a Counter Shield or aBeam Shield (or both from S4) which forces you to shoot beam first and then counter.
- The flow of enemies is very intense and since you do not shoot enemies while countering (except with their bullets), if you are trying to topscore you have to vary your strategies as much as possible.

I am still wondering if this will be enough to make the game as challenging as possible but since after long hours of betatesting it is still pretty challenging for me, I have good hopes.

As always, thanks for the comments!
Can't wait to let you all play it!

[ciox]

Sounds good actually, does the counter have ties to scoring? Didn't notice anything about that in the material so far, if it has many limitations like you say and you can't use it for survival very much (like say bombs) then it feels more like a show-off and scoring type of mechanic.

[Tafia Tchagata]

Well as everyone in the team (we are 4) has a different way of playing the game I can only vouch from my perspective but I think that the mechanic is a "show-off" during the first 2 stages (Mountain and Forest) and becomes a gameplay necessity during the S3 (temple) when we introduce the counter shields that can only be broken with a countered bullets. What the mechanic actually did to our level design is that we have very short mini-boss fight (around 1 min to kill them) in which if you don't decide to dodge and shoot it is pretty difficult to kill them (and score) before they leave. So the counter can also be seen as a beginner's weapon but what our playtest sessions showed us is that people where actually afraid to use is to much and prefered to first dodge and then little by little learn to counter correctly. Also we have bullet pattern that are almost impossible to dodge, forcing you to use the counter.

As for the scoring system, the more you counter the more the percentage above the score HUD will rise, applying a multiplier on your kills. This system tends to help forming a larger gap between top players and beginners.

[Gosh Tchagata]

Hi everybody!
Nice to meet you, I'm Gosh, the character designer and illustrator of Tchagata Games.

Just a brief message to say thank you so much for your comments, it's a big motivation to see your interest!!!

Gosh!

Ps: sorry for my poor English

[spadgy]

This one looks really interesting. I've just watched the trailer, and by the end when the bullet numbers are a little higher, it's looks great. I look forward to seeing more of it! Good luck!

[ciox]

Ah, really seems there's nothing to worry about then with so many things to do with the mechanic, I'll be looking forward to the first playable release.

[Tafia Tchagata]

It's great to see you enjoy the visuals as well! It is challenging to be a swiss team and make a game heavily japan-oriented. Still it allowed us to be selected by the Neuchatel Museum of Ethnography for their next exhibition called "Imagine Japan"(http://www.men.ch/). Starting in june, the exhibition will try to show how the outside perception of Japan can give birth to creative projects. So...with a deadline in june we are working as fast as we can to have the game (the first 3 stages) ready for the exhibition ground. As in Tchagata Games we all have other occupations, it is pretty challenging (I guess you fellow devs can all understand the issues of debugging and betatesting...).

Still, we hope to be able to give you a playable game around that time, if we can't our next release target would be on august the 9th, Super Long Nose Goblin release date...

Thanks for the energy!!

[Edge]

Very nice art style.
The game looks interesting. Have to agree with some of the points above, the player sprite seems pretty big. And just from the video footage the parrying seems like it might make things too easy for experienced players. But it's hard to tell just from the video, because it's hard to judge the underlying restrictions, also we don't know how strict the timing is etc.

As for play testers:
I also like to get a lot of feedback from play testers. Especcially when they are no hardcore shmup fans. As it helps to make the game more accessible. Eventually attracting outsiders of the niche group the shmup community is in the moment. However for the high level scoring it is very useful to get the feedback of more dedicated shmup players. As the pre-existing knowledge and experiene with the genre differs a lot. Games that seem like unbeatable for a newcomer might not be demanding enough for an experienced player, and actually be too easy and boring for them to even bother.

Don't know about the skill level among your team members and testers. AND of course you don't need to make the most hardcore shmup ever. Just wanted to point that out.


BTW:
Hard Corps Uprising also had some kind of parrying-mechanic. There you had to tap a seperate button to make one single bullet a time fly back to the opponent. Might be interesting as a reference.

[Ghastly]

Slick. I love countering mechanics. The baseball bat in BangaiO Spirits is one of my all time favorite video game attacks and SF3's parries are why that's still my favorite fighter.

Are there any shooters that use ONLY countering, with no other player weapons? It seems like someone MUST have made something like that, right?

(more importantly, is there a game like that that's actually fun?)

[nasty_wolverine]

Are there any shooters that use ONLY countering, with no other player weapons? It seems like someone MUST have made something like that, right?
(more importantly, is there a game like that that's actually fun?)

mars matrix, gigawing, reflex... those are the ones i can think of the top of my head.

[Tafia Tchagata]

Also from the top of my head:

While not being an "only counter" game I think that the recent Platinum Games's mechanics in MGS Rising is very close to being one in the very hard mode. Simply put, it's pretty much all about timing and counter (in the direction of the enemy...SFThird Strike much...). This is another exemple showing how this crazy guys from Osaka are influenced by arcade mechanics.

And while I am here, do you guys have any advices/tips/links for promotion in the japanese dôjin scene. I am fluent in japanese but can't seem to find a definitive spot to lay our eggs...(hum...)

Thanks for the support

[Ghastly]

Are there any shooters that use ONLY countering, with no other player weapons? It seems like someone MUST have made something like that, right?
(more importantly, is there a game like that that's actually fun?)

mars matrix, gigawing, reflex... those are the ones i can think of the top of my head.

Thanks. I know that Mars Matrix and Gigawing are two that I need to play but I haven't gotten around to it. Now I guess I have to put those at the top of my queue.

[Doctor Butler]

3S parries in a shooter. What is the world coming to?

Looks awesome; really the only comment I can make, is the same "he's to big" criticism.

Reduce by at least half his current size, or more. Have you considered redrawing him in a more horizontal, or leaning stance? It seems it would be awkward to control him in a standing pose like that.

[Tafia Tchagata]

3S parries in a shooter. What is the world coming to?

Looks awesome; really the only comment I can make, is the same "he's to big" criticism.

Reduce by at least half his current size, or more. Have you considered redrawing him in a more horizontal, or leaning stance? It seems it would be awkward to control him in a standing pose like that.

Thanks a lot for the feedback!! Indeed, we realized how strange it is to have him standing while the background is moving forward. Apparently, the designer wants to redo the main character spritesheet to correct it before our planned release on XBLIndieGames and PC (Fingercrossed on this august). Still, during the bosses, the background changes to a right-left movement (as if the boss is chasing you) and we have to think of a way of implementing the new stance without too much coding.

We just finished correcting the level design of the stage 3 (revolving around the counter mechanic) and tried as much as possible to find an interesting way of forcing the player to learn and use the counter system. For example we have enemies with 1lifepoint but a Counter Shield so you have to counter 2 of their aiming bullets (countered aiming bullets aims at the firing enemy) to kill them before they leave the screen.

[Tafia Tchagata]

Don't know about the skill level among your team members and testers. AND of course you don't need to make the most hardcore shmup ever. Just wanted to point that out.

BTW:
Hard Corps Uprising also had some kind of parrying-mechanic. There you had to tap a seperate button to make one single bullet a time fly back to the opponent. Might be interesting as a reference.

I totally agree with your point Edge. Furthermore, as our game can be visually attractive to new shmup players I hope to make it as accessible as possible to them. My first idea, since we don't have a difficulty setting yet, would be to copy the Ikaruga system and have an easy mode with the first 3 stages and a normal mode with the 5 stages in the final version (not the one we will make available in august...)

As for your suggestion of checking Hard Corps...HUUUGE help of the timing/implementation of the counter system!! Thanks a lot!

[buko-studios]

Loving the look of this!
Given you a shout out on our shmuproom

There seem to be a lot of comments on the player size. Perhaps this could be customised (large/small/opacity) in the settings?
Thanks for sharing!