Electric After Dark Podcast - I'm Making a Shmup! My Design Philosophy (for better or worse)
Added 2021-07-24 11:06:24 +0000 UTC
Comments
Yes I'm really excited to see how this turns out!
The Electric Underground
2021-09-01 15:54:17 +0000 UTCI look forward to your game. I think you''ll get more out of the journey than the finish product. Its a nice motivator for me as I attempt to make shooter myself. An artist that can't program a lick but that hasn't stop me. Love the focus, just take it one day at a time, you'll get there. You make some excellent points and your perspective on keeping a game active is interesting.
Lost Ark
2021-08-31 02:29:28 +0000 UTCNice episode, Mark, I really enjoy your podcasts with all your side trackings and musings 😀. If your design goals include making the likes of Jaimers sweat I have a feeling your game will not be one for the masses 😀. I am very curious what it will look like!
Martin Wöhrle
2021-08-09 17:19:42 +0000 UTCyeah i'll definitely be doing some real heavy play testing to see how the concepts play out
The Electric Underground
2021-08-02 19:22:23 +0000 UTCYou touched on the core point re: criticism near the end there. Describing something is a different skill set than performing it. How many musicians give dull, cliche-filled interviews because they don't have the ability to communicate in that fashion? Game design isn't even really 'a' skillset per se, it's a set of interconnected sub-disciplines. But beyond that, it's not a constant either. It's not just like "oh, he has an 87 in game design ability" and that's that. Even Miyamoto has some dogs on his resume. More to the point, this would be a first attempt. Go play the first Thunder Force. Or look at the guy who formed Gazelle after Toaplan went under, and ended up describing their first (and only) shmup, Air Gallet, as "borderline kusoge." The point isn't whether you turn out a Tiger Heli on your first attempt. It's whether that ability to analyze and communicate the elements of the genre allows you to identify & improve on what needed improving.
Philip Mason
2021-08-01 04:43:06 +0000 UTCYou might want to start with two stages and do a repeat loop to test out the idea of "no break shmup" game.
JBRPG
2021-07-28 22:54:05 +0000 UTCYes I'm thinking that might be how it turns out. I guess we'll have a better idea as I start laying out the stages!
The Electric Underground
2021-07-27 16:01:34 +0000 UTCYes I was thinking of that example. I was like, oh man I don't want to end up like ebert and his movie ha
The Electric Underground
2021-07-27 16:00:44 +0000 UTCyes exactly ha
The Electric Underground
2021-07-27 16:00:07 +0000 UTCSounds really interesting, will be looking forward to it! I think 4 stages is probably better than 5, to ease the burden on both the player and your development, considering the density and intensity you're going for. But that's just my take.
HotPocketHPE
2021-07-27 05:40:51 +0000 UTCPlaying a game (and reviewing it) and making a game are two linked, but very different skills. You can be great at one and not the other, but hopefully you will be great at both :)
Ben Bishop
2021-07-26 03:52:20 +0000 UTCRe: the final segment about you being a critic vs making a bad game. Roger Ebert co-wrote Beyond the Valley of the Dolls which was heavily panned by critics. He's enshrined as one of the most important film critics of all time despite that. Fear not and make the game you want to make. I'll play it!
Darrin Griffin
2021-07-26 01:53:17 +0000 UTCinteresting! I'll have to take a look at gundemonium and see :-)
The Electric Underground
2021-07-24 22:08:52 +0000 UTCyes exactly! i'm excited for you to try it out :-)
The Electric Underground
2021-07-24 22:08:10 +0000 UTCoh hell yeah great recommend! I will def give a listen (I've been looking for something like this to listen to ha). As far as the game intesity, so in the alpha version I think I figured this out where yes the game is not 100% all the time because that's crazy, but it basically never drops below 70%. I notice that you do find little breaks in the design, but the difference is that they player has to earn every single break, they aren't built in as easily. I think at the end I will either create something really compelling or a nightmare, it can go either way at this point ha. We'll def see though as I start rolling out the stage testing to the patrons!
The Electric Underground
2021-07-24 22:07:33 +0000 UTCSounds like you’ve got some cool ideas man! A few quick things I thought of while listening: 1) From a game design perspective the potential catch with constant max intensity is that psychologically the transition from lower to higher intensity is where the most tension is felt. Too long at max intensity can normalize and feel like an emotional plateau. But you also don’t want to drop to zero for breaks like most shmups do So one thing that might help what it sounds like you’re aiming for is to apply the gameplay action version of that audio trick where you make a sound seem like it’s building infinitely: https://youtu.be/LVWTQcZbLgY https://youtu.be/BzNzgsAE4F0 I drew a quick crappy diagram on my phone lol: http://bulletproofoutlaws.com/junk/IMG_0635.JPG The top chart is how most shmups go, build up to intensity and then drop to zero to let you catch your breath then build up again rinse & repeat But the bottom chart would follow that infinitely rising audio trick...if when you hit max intensity you very gradually taper it down but not to zero, juuust down enough to like 90% so that you can do a sudden slight but noticeable intensity ramp back up to 100%, then slowwwly taper it back down to 90% so you can do another ramp up. In THEORY that would let you keep the pressure on while also purposely luring the player into psychologically feeing unnerving infinitely ramping intensity like that audio trick does because the taper down would be gradual enough and minor enough to not notice it happening and then BAM a sudden vertical spike when the player felt like they were already at max intensity...like the number of bullets on screen going from 1000/sec (or whatever lol) gradually over a couple minutes down to 900/sec just for the sake of being able to suddenly go back to 1000/sec and feel like it inexplicably escalated higher than max intensity 2) if you haven’t read Masters of Doom before you should check it out. The audiobook version is really well done for listening to on the go or in the shower etc if you don’t have time to sit down & read. It’s like the ultimate indie devs motivational story and they focused on an iterative development philosophy too, building up their games in stages as they improved their skills and could aim a little higher on each new game. And they focused on the “does this idea/feature fit the goal of this game’s design? If not, rip it out even if it’s finished”. Like in Wolf3D they let you drag & hide corpses etc which was cool but as soon as they tested it they felt it went against the fast paced feeling they wanted design-wise so they ripped the whole feature out. It’s a super inspiring story as a dev, can’t recommend it enough lol
Tsugumo
2021-07-24 17:16:53 +0000 UTCBased on what Josh said above I'm excited to hear the episode. Gundemonium does the caravan design expansion into a new game as well which is really what makes it fun.
Akshay Wadekar
2021-07-24 16:46:07 +0000 UTCSounds like you're going the opposite direction, design wise, from taking a traditional shmup and making a caravan mode. This seems like you're taking ideas that would make a great caravan shooter, and expanding them out into a full length game, but with other ideas and concepts that maybe haven't been implemented yet. I dig it.
Josh Dieckmann
2021-07-24 14:51:57 +0000 UTC
