Shmup Design

Celia Wagar4 Comments

Any good game design articles on shoot ’em ups? Also, what do you personally thing makes a fun shmup?

None that I know of, besides this which is more of a history article:
http://www.racketboy.com/retro/shooters/shmups-101-a-beginners-guide-to-2d-shooters
and this, which is kind of a beginner’s guide:
https://catstronaut.wordpress.com/2013/02/18/understanding-scrolling-shooters/

I don’t totally know. I have a huge list of shmups to eventually play, but I haven’t gotten very far into the genre.

I’m gonna say the same thing I always say for what makes a good game: Depth and challenge. Interesting choices.

There seem to be two schools on what makes a good shmup, there’s the danmaku school, and the more classic reactive shmup school. From an outsider’s perspective it seems like there’s a division between games that are considered great because they have good scoring systems that are difficult to master, like perhaps Ikaruga, and games that are considered great because they’ll fucking kill you. There’s games that curtain the screen in bullets of all different sizes in intricate patterns that must be weaved through (like touhou), then there’s games where the enemies are reactive to your position and patterns and try to attack you in ways that you need to react to and counter (like mars matrix).

Some basic notes I took on the Touhou scoring system are that its various components require you to choose between one another and put yourself in harm’s way. The most iconic is grazing bullets of course, if you have your character sprite touch a bullet without it hitting you, your graze score goes up, which scores points and acts as a point multiplier I believe. This means you need to get close to bullets to gain points, rising death. Even better to get closer to the bullet’s source where many bullets will pass by you, but that’s dangerous of course. Next, there’s item collection, which can mean weaving across fields of bullets to get in position to collect items. Then there’s the point of collection, a line near the top of the screen where all the items will be collected automatically, but that’s of course where the enemies are, so that’s dangerous, and you can’t shoot them there. Bombs earn score based on how many bullets are on the screen, so more bullets is higher score, which is dangerous for obvious reasons. Intentionally losing lives to get more bombs is advantageous for scoring too, so you’re not allowed to keep all your lives if you want to score the highest, you need to put yourself right next to death at some point. Basically, they really want you to go up close to the bosses and potentially get your shit rocked.

I have written a little about how I’d design a shmup privately, and most of it involves emphasizing the reactivity of enemies, trying to cook up new behaviors for them that emphasize decision making from the player.

Advice for Smash Players Picking up 2d Fighters

Celia WagarLeave a comment

Do you have any advice for a smash player that wants to get into 2d fighters (especially stretch fighter 5) I’ve never played 2d fighter but I am thinking about trying it. Also what controller should I get for playing on pc

Only the same advice I have for players trying to get into traditional fighting games in the first place.
https://critpoints.wordpress.com/2015/03/20/street-fighting-for-beginners/
This links to a TON of other guides at the bottom. Please consult all of them, and the shoryuken wiki page for the particular fighting game you want to play.

What I’ll say is, the control system will not feel natural to you at first. You have access to more moves at a time, and it’s not going to be as obvious how all of them are used, because they all point in the same direction and they all come out and recover much faster. Learning what each of your normals is good for, getting them all down to the point where you know which one of them hits in which place at which range on command, and being able to identify what a normal is good for on a character you’ve never played before.

Practice anti-airing jump-ins. A great training technique is to record the bot doing something you want to practice against, like jumping in with a medium kick. A good thing to do is have the bot jab twice beforehand so you can react to the timing and simulate reading the move. Learn to use both normal anti-airs and special anti-airs. normals are good for reacting when you’re uncertain when they’ll jump, specials are good for reading, when you’re certain they’ll jump and when. You need both of these, you need to be fast and accurate at both of these.

Get down blocking. Blocking is absolutely critical, a lot of beginners don’t block enough. Block low all the time, then high when they’re in the air or doing an overhead attack. You can’t react to lows, but you can react to the other two, and lows deal more damage. As you get better, learn to fight standing up moving back and forth instead of being rooted to the ground in a blocking stance. Learn to do the block motion while jumping in, while attacking, while dashing, so you always do it the first instant after you stop. This will help you play charge characters too.

Learn what frame advantage/disadvantage is and how to identify which moves have it. Or look up framedata until you get the pattern. Learn when moves hit, how long they take to recover, etc.

You can use whatever controller you want. All major fight sticks have PC drivers. There are PS3 and PS4 drivers and wrappers to make them behave like 360 controllers (which is what most things on PC support). For 2d fighters the control choice doesn’t matter a great amount unless you plan to switch at some point.

Oh, and play a lot of people.

2D vs 3D Precision

Celia WagarLeave a comment

Do you think that the whole “2D is more precise than 3D” argument/meme that gets brought up primarily by nostalgic old guards has any truth to it? Tbh, having grown up with 3D games, I find 3D Mario much more precise and easier to control than any of the 2D Marios (except the New games). Granted the old 2D Marios had slippery movement and looser controls, but the point stands, that it kind of depends on which one you developed your muscle memory with. Plus, with all the scary-precise speedruns, I don’t think the argument holds much salt. I’ve never even seen anyone specifiy just what they mean by “precision” other than “I find 3D Mario difficult b/c I’m an old man, therefore 2D games are more precise”.

Precision is vague here. Does it mean that in 2d you’re able to more reliably replicate scenarios involving fine movement, or does it mean allowing one to express a greater degree of precision in operation? In 2d games, there are less variables involved in their operation. Especially old 2d games on pixel based platforms, because there literally was no unit of movement smaller than a pixel (even though a lot of these calculated movement in subpixels, the environments didn’t have subpixels anywhere, so it generally didn’t matter), where the same is not true for say super meat boy or Ori and the Blind Forest, where units of measurement can be infinitely subdivided. Continue reading →

Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines Overview

Celia WagarLeave a comment

Thought’s on Vampire the masquerade?

Okay, I played this game like 3 times, having to restart for various reasons. A ton of dialogue is recycled between different dialogue choices, with minor minor differences. This is especially noticeable with Therese and Jeanette.

I really like the backstory to VTM (mostly gleaned from the whitewolf wiki), but the game is crap overall. The fighting is crap. The dialogue choices are crap. The stealth is crap. The fighting is like, it changes what attacks are performed based on which direction is held, and somehow that affects whether enemies block, I think. In general just mash the attack button and directions and you’ll be fine. As the game progresses you need to fight more and more.

You need to run around back and forth a lot for all sorts of boring reasons. It’s built on the source engine, so there’s bunny hopping. I’m not very good at bunnyhopping, you can apparently go twice as fast that way.

It’s a pain to figure out which way to go some times, some areas have some cute set pieces like the ocean house hotel, whatever place does the mannequin trick, and a couple others.

There’s a bunch of useless skills, because whoever made the game wasn’t very careful. There’s also a bunch of bugs because it was probably rushed. The animations are silly as all hell.

I got to almost the end, and got stuck by a bugged door that refused to open because I didn’t install the fan patch. Installing the patch at that point didn’t fix it and I wasn’t seriously replaying the whole thing again.

There isn’t much to comment on, I don’t think there’s much to defend. It doesn’t seem to succeed even at the things people typically laud the game for. The interactive things at least. Though I guess it’s kind of faithful to the universe in terms of writing and content.

Critpoints Glossary

Celia Wagar3 Comments

After some thought, I’ve decided to make a glossary to help people who might not understand some of the terms I use. Some of these are terms I’ve made up myself, those will be noted as such. Rather than being ordered alphabetically like a conventional glossary, I’m ordering this so related terms are closer together, and you can get an idea of a topic from the terms close together.

I’m going to borrow from Critical Gaming’s glossary a little as well as general terminology that is sitting out there. This isn’t meant to be comprehensive, just things that might be a bit out of the way for the common gamer (though I might have gone overboard and included a bunch of obvious entries too). These are the terms you might not know, but probably need to know in order to understand this blog or my writing in general. Continue reading →

MTM: Evo Moment #37

Celia WagarLeave a comment

This is More than Mashing, a column on amazing demonstrations of skill in video games where I try to collect and showcase the best the net has to offer in skilled game playing and break it down so anyone can understand. This week I’m covering Daigo’s full parry.

Fighting games are a genre notorious for their high barriers of entry and the dexterity necessary to perform basic moves, let alone the long combos of attacks strung together the genre is known for. For this reason, many have accused fighting games of being button mashers, because beginners have a tendency to mash the buttons more than actually try to learn the game, and can even overtake worse players with these tactics. Despite misunderstandings, Fighting Games are one of the most skillful genres we have today. Continue reading →

MTM: Rapha vs Cooller

Celia WagarLeave a comment

2014-09-30_000551.jpg

Quake 3 was always a game that stood out to me as being one of the “purest” of the classic arena shooters. Watching this clip of Rapha vs Cooller was what really brought the game to life in my eyes. I had always appreciated the game for pure simple shooting with some great weapons, but Rapha’s commentary let me in on how the game really worked. Quake is a game of knowledge, sound, and fury. Continue reading →

Hotline Miami Review

Celia WagarLeave a comment

Hotline Miami is a top-down twin-stick shooter that creates a fast and furious blend of stealth and combat, designed up front for quick, satisfying showdowns with a large number of intensely lethal enemies while simultaneously requiring the player to very carefully manage their path through the level, lines of sight, and noise level to avoid being overwhelmed.

Hotline Miami views the player from a top-down perspective much in the style of older games like Grand Theft Auto or Die Hard. The player has independent control of both the character’s movement and aiming direction as twin-stick shooter implies. The goal of almost every Hotline Miami level is to kill every enemy on the current floor before moving to the next one. A variety of weapons can be collected in levels either as drops from enemies or just found lying around, these range between different melee weapons to various firearms. The game is extremely lethal, one strike from a melee weapon or bullet will kill most enemies and the player as well. Most floors are designed to be relatively short and should the player die they have an instant reset with no penalty except time. Continue reading →

MTM: Gunz – Legendkiller 2

Celia WagarLeave a comment

This is More than Mashing, a column on amazing demonstrations of skill in video games where I try to collect and showcase the best the net has to offer in skilled game playing and break it down so anyone can understand. This week I have LegendKiller : 2 on the chopping block. I’ve seen a lot of Gunz videos, and this one doesn’t show the most tricks, but I love its production values and choice of music. Continue reading →