SpaceShooter
Half G-a-D, Half Conventional, All New
SpaceShooter is a hybrid remix between the code and assets from RecoilRocks and the play style of horizontally-scrolling shoot’em ups like Gradius (1985 Konami). The mashup is further disrupted by making player loss based not on ship destruction (the player takes no damage), but rather on letting a single enemy past, taking on an isolated but significant aspect from football or “red rover”.
Gameplay Tips
Every write-up is an experiment in itself; for a change of pace, tonight I’ll experiment with the strategy guide route before going into the more typical mechanics and meaning dissection. (I.e. if you are uninterested in tips, just skip over them and you’ll find the usual content below!)
In much the same way that Maslow’s Hierarchy suggests that philosophical understanding is built upon basic needs being met, so long as survival is the main concern in a videogame, reflection on meaning is likely inhibited. Surviving must come before thinking. Hopefully, the following tips will prove helpful in getting more out of time with SpaceShooter.
- The smaller a target is, the faster it moves. This means that leaving large targets alone is a good strategy while occupied with the descendants of another.
- The largest target splits into two slightly smaller and faster targets. Each medium sized target splits into two slightly smaller and faster targets. The small sized targets can be destroyed in as single hit, and will visually confirm their elimination with a simple orange explosion effect.
- Often, a target and all or most of its descendants can be obliterated in one fell swoop. Since this limits the number of high speed small targets in the level, any reliable means of doing this serves as a major advantage.
- Rushing toward a target reduces the horizontal gap between shots, giving smaller descendant targets less of a chance to escape.
- The player’s gunship cannot be destroyed. The only way to lose is to allow a target to cross the edge. Sitting in the middle of targets is generally not an ideal strategy, since targets only move left, but in general there is no reason to be shy about getting up close to the targets.
- Moving the mouse outside of the playable window causes the player’s gunship to slide along the edge. Although playing up against the edge isn’t generally as useful as rushing targets, in a pinch whipping the mouse past the left edge ensures that the gun will be positioned left of any in-bounds target.
- Firing a few shots deliberately above and below the center of a target is another tactic that helps destroy fresh targets before they can spread out.
- Since targets bounce off the top and bottom edges, targets are the most vulnerable while in this area.
- Collapsing a line of shots onto a target while moving in from opposite the nearest edge is likely to eliminate targets attempting to escape into the larger area, trapping the remaining targets against the edge for easier elimination.
- There is no way to affect which directions descendant targets will split into - the angles are purely random, and will not take into account the angle of attack or the destroyed parent target’s previous velocity.
Fighting “The Wave” Tactic
In many horizontal space shooters, simply weaving side-to-side firing (while dodging enemy shots) is one of the simplest and most effective strategies. One of my design objectives in emulating a space-shooter type game was to avoid this type of simplification, since I think it leads to games where the player could be replaced by an oscillating fan hooked to a joystick. Accordingly, this type of play strategy rapidly degenerates a player’s control over the situation in SpaceShooter, achieved via a combination of (A.) smaller targets flying faster (and B.) the rate of fire being constant, and slow enough to leave significant gaps when the mouse is used to strafe rapidly. Note that the difficulty presented in this context builds upon itself - trying to chase so many tiny targets gives other rocks of all sizes time to advance toward the player’s line.
The Downside to Gameplay Tips
There are many ways that enjoyment can be found in a game. One of the most common ways that action gamers respond well to comes from situations where heuristic strategies can be derived and practiced. By “heuristic strategies”, I’m referring to identifying which patterns of input and avatar movement yield positive results, and then using reptetion to hone and refine those patterns. In a first-person shooter, for example, these patterns are those keyboard/mouse or dual-analog combinations that allow a player to dodge without compromosing target alignment.
There are certain high-level patterns that apply to a simple mouse game like this (”keep the mouse moving” - effective since shots cover a taller stretch of potential target area), but for the most part I took all the “good ones” by giving away significant internal details in the Game Tips section. There’s a reasonably good chance that for every casual player that gets more from a game like this due to tips, there will be another non-casual player that feels like I took the fun/interesting part out of it.
No matter, though. This is a game about its message…
The Metaphor
The message is the mechanics: the game implicitly rewards finishing what’s started, before starting something new, as a means of preventing opened issues from spreading out of control. The symbolism is rather minimal, and provided someone can accept the targets here to represent a generic “obstacle” (which it is) or “thing that must be done” (which it also is), the rest of the details for the metaphor conditioning come through quite literally.
Keep problems from spreading out of control in SpaceShooter.
January 21st, 2008 at 8:49 pm
You certainly stopped the ‘wave tactic’ as you call it!
But maybe the metaphor would have been stronger had at least one of the smaller circles moved at an angle at least as close to the horizontal as its parent? As is, we can sometimes end with a tiny circle moving almost vertically, which seems almost counter to your point.
On a separate note, what made you introduce a difficulty selector to the newest (’bomb defusing’) game but not this one? I’d be interested to know your rationale as I felt that a metaphor may be better appreciated if it is gleaned through repeated play rather than explicitly explained. A difficulty slider could still operate within a range where the same tactics were necessary (thus the same implicit metaphor existing). It’d just mean that folk might glean more enjoyment by playing at an ‘interesting’ difficulty whilst they soak up the metaphor.
January 22nd, 2008 at 10:26 am
> As is, we can sometimes end with a tiny circle moving almost vertically, which seems almost counter to your point.
How so? It still advances (however little), it still distracts attention from more important targets, and trying to hit it still increases the likelihood of accidentally busting open new big targets. These occur rarely enough in their extreme form that I don’t see them as much of a problem.
> On a separate note, what made you introduce a difficulty selector to the newest (’bomb defusing’) game but not this one?
Two reasons:
(1) For this game, I was experimenting the “strategy guide”/tips approach, thinking that perhaps it’s better to help people play something the way it is meant to be played, instead of offering a diluted version. The difference between this game on hard or easy would dramatically affect how it’s played (due to other varaibles like shot speed and collision boxes having a major difference given object speed or number variation), unlike RoboDefuser, in which difficulty only affects the pace at which the same things happen; this works well for RoboDefuser because it is primarily a game focused on the input mechanism, instead of being about systems outside the player’s immediate control.
(2) I made this game first, and making a difficulty slider under the bottom hadn’t occurred to me yet.
;)