came for the cute karous girl, stayed for the kickass design breakdown. i'm not even a gamedev and i'm still taking notes, bless boghog

I never even thought about making a game until watching all of your videos, and now I can't stop thinking about it. I also wish there was more to talk about, so I could keep watching your breakdowns.

@boghogSTG

Жыл бұрын

Hell yeah! Good that these inspired you. Theres always a lot more to say about the stuff I covered, but I dont wanna get lost in the sauce cause really the vids could last hours and get extremely abstract and niche. I do wanna cover other topics though, maybe some beat em up design for example

@ghosttrain42

Жыл бұрын

@@boghogSTG a beat em up series would be great

@LHCGreg

Жыл бұрын

@@boghogSTG I'd love to see a beat em up design guide doc/videos. I've occasionally linked people to that discussion you did with Electric Underground and Juan Man to try to get across what I look for in beat em ups, why Final Fight is my favorite beat em up (and favorite game), and why I won't try River City Girls. But a 3 hour video is a tough sell.

@boghogSTG

Жыл бұрын

@@LHCGreg I'd like to make a bmup myself before I work on a design guide ( or better yet make a guide *as I work on it* ) but I do have something brewin I think. Been trying to find a good "lense" to think about combat design that kinda wraps up everything I like (and prob what you like given your love for FF) in a nice elegant package. The idea is "what central resource are you & the enemies fighting for?", just gotta sort out my thoughts & make a vid. Also yeah the podcasts are definitely not something you can send to your buddy unless they're already neck deep into it lol

@seraph8293

10 ай бұрын

@@boghogSTGit would be great if you could talk about combining beat ‘em ups and shmups

Another fantastic video! I'm always amazed how sometimes playing for score can almost make a shmup feel like a different game versus just trying to survive.

@boghogSTG

Жыл бұрын

Yeah, thats when the games really come into their own and become unique

I watch these only for the RE4 clips

@boghogSTG

Жыл бұрын

The last 2 eps have been a real kings feast for you

This has nothing to do with the video. But I just wanted to say thank you for putting the tutorials explaining the basics of shmups in Gunvein. To some that stuff might seem obvious, but to me it wasn’t. And now for the first time ever I actually feel like I’m improving at shmups. And it feels great!

@boghogSTG

Жыл бұрын

You're welcome! That's awesome to know, making them as forceful/difficult as I did was a bit risky but since it seems to be helping people get into the genre I think it's 100% worth it. Hopefully you'll keep improving & won't be discouraged by the inevitable mini-plateaus

Its incredible how concise and informative this series is! Great job!

Awesome video Boghog! I love the pros and cons of the different types of scoring systems!

How you only have 1K subs? Your videos are amazing!

@boghogSTG

Жыл бұрын

Thank you! Honestly 1K isn't bad considering that it's shmups & I barely do anything to promote these vids

Great work, this was very informative.

My favorite part of shmups! Very good rundown on the ins and outs of scoring stuffs! :D I feel mesmerized (in a good way) from all the archetypes covered at the last section of the video, heheh

7:35 yey, Hellsinker!! Whenever shmup players talk about complexity, Hellsinker is always brought up to the topic.

@boghogSTG

Жыл бұрын

Ye, not only is it complicated but it also doesn't do much to ease you into the complexity in-game so it's a rough one

@soratheorangejuicemascot5809

Жыл бұрын

@@boghogSTG Hellsinker really did alot of stuff in terms of scoring. Grazing, bullet cancelling, item collecting(immortality bonus, tokens, etc), speedkills, dismembering, and so on. Heck that game even made a 3 separate score board just for those.

If you're planning on continuing the series, I'd love to hear you talk about balancing difficulty modes and possibly Rank systems. (On the extreme, I hear people talk about having to babysit rank in Battle Garrega to keep it beatable and conceptually I don't get the appeal, but also haven't played it yet so I'm willing to chalk that up to ignorance.) Btw I picked up Gunvein on the recent shmup sale and it's been fantastic. Good work.

@boghogSTG

8 ай бұрын

Rank would be an awesome topic, I'd need to play more rank heavy games myself before that though but I'll have to add that topic to The List Garegga/Yagawa style games are very much an acquired taste since they are so different to basically everything else and go completely against modern design in almost every way but here's a nice vid that I think does a good job of explaining the appeal : kzread.info/dash/bejne/enqelZevfqjNXcY.html

First off, congrats for Gunvein I love it even though it still kicks my ass and for the subject matter I think Crimson clover nailed the visual rewards part...this is the part in Shmups I find the more attractive with the visual and sound overload, I just love that slot machine reward feel.

@boghogSTG

9 ай бұрын

Thanks! Yeah Crimzon Clover abso-fucking-lutely nails the feedback, game feels insanely good

Really excellent!

still hope to make my own shmup one day. so this is great and seeing so many great games back to back is nice to see Nice one man

@boghogSTG

Жыл бұрын

Thanks! And good luck when you get to devving your own shmup

Not a shmup but since you’ve put images of it, I think Resi 5 mercenaries reunion scoring mode is perfect. The basis of the mode is “kill as much enemies as you can before you run out of time”. So the fact that you increment a combo as long as you don’t let too many seconds pass by between each kills is pretty intuitive. This is the main way to get points and it’s exponential. The players will feel a huge adrenaline rush as their combos get close or past their best previous attempt and it incentivizes them to keep coming back at it. You are allotted a limited amount of time, but you can get more. The main way for that is to destroy a certain item spread out in the levels. This introduces difficult tactical decisions as the players need to explore yet still kill the enemies without any significant time gap between two kills. Exploring first can be a solution but the drawbacks are a significant time loss and the fact they will still need to come back to the various areas as each one spawns a limited number of enemies (as a nice twist, the last level is exempted from that rule). Exploring and killing at the same time force to always balance movement with combo maintenance. The 2nd way to bring the time up is by killing every enemy with a melee move. This is very clever as it makes balancing movement with combo maintenance even harder, pushes the player to get closer to the enemies and thus to take more risks, and rewards a fun, deeper, gameplay, where the players need to mix bullets with contextual punches and kicks and delve into the stun system of the game. The total number of enemies in each level is also limited, so a run can end because the players have killed everyone. At which point, the remaining time also become points but not to the extent of the combo. This keep the foundation of the scoring system intact while still rewarding over achievement and makes the mode still appealing even for those who are good enough to get every enemy in one combo. There’s some form of rank system. Getting very far put extra pressure on the players as enemies will mutate far more frequently. This makes the gameplay even deeper as they may want to rely on slower melee options (that you get from other forms of stuns) that prevent mutations. The difference in frames between the melee moves also mean that they need to mind the time they have between each kill and adapt in real time with suboptimal options if it means keeping the combo going. And this works every way, like losing a few amount of time with every melee if they don’t have any fast way to deal with a mutation! The few bosses that spawn at a fixed number of kills reward a greater number of points if they are killed later in the combo. This also synergizes completely with how the game plays. To keep killing enemies in CQC with a boss around means perfectly managing their s so more melee moves but also grabbing items for the sake of getting s. Which pushes players to manage their inventory in real time thanks to clearly the best menuing ever, so that they can grab anything the moment they need to go through a potentially killing blow. Something they might have to discard in a clever way right after. The more you score, the more you delve deeper into the game mechanics. While surviving should have become too easy for people who repeatedly dispatch 150 enemies including bosses in one go, trying to go for melee kills while not losing the combo, while not getting killed by the relentless attacks of a boss, while not making detour for health pickups, while stocking less items so as to keep one or two empty inventory boxes, all of that make surviving still a foremost concern and death a penalty for someone too greedy. Just everything’s there. You evolve very naturally in this sphere, adding new layers as you progress, none contradicting the rest, and while many games with a deep scoring system ends up filling restrictive, here it’s pushing you to exploit even more of the possibilities offered by the gameplay. That’s why 14 years after its release, RE5 mercenaries mode are still highly played, with usually more than a hundred of scoring youtube vids published every weak (and that’s now!). In the meantime, 3 months after its big mercenaries update, you hardly found 10 new videos a week about the scoring mode of the fresh RE VIllage.

@boghogSTG

Жыл бұрын

Damn, really selling me on it! I actually haven't played RE5 mercs a whole lot, just messed around with it a bit. One thing I'm not a huge fan of in RE mercs as a whole is the item pickups - they add depth but it feels like busywork to run around grabbing stuff for what's otherwise a pretty action packed scoring mode. The conflict between delay-based scoring & speedkilling based scoring is interesting to me (time bonus vs combo chain in RE5's case) - it's tricky from a dev POV to figure out what to focus on. In shmups there's a general anti delay-based scoring attitude (especially boss milking dear god people are prejudiced against it), but I don't think that's true in other genres. RE games in particular are more methodical and slower paced to begin with, so timing & delay based scoring seems like a perfectly natural fit.

Don't forget about dairy-based scoring like Darius Old where you wanna milk those bosses for every drop! ;)

@boghogSTG

Жыл бұрын

True I shoulda talked about milking more, my beloved Psyvariar is a farming sim

It's still amazing how when most genres just abandoned conventional scoring outside a few specific games, shmups just went and took the concept as far as it can go.

@boghogSTG

Жыл бұрын

My theory that I have absolutely no evidence for what so ever is that other genres didn't need to work on scoring cuz they had variability due to manual scrolling and such - if you get too good at early levels you can always do them faster & faster. In shmups there's no such thing though, so I think that's what pushed developers to really work on scoring systems to fill that gap.

Thank you.

number go up, brain chemicals go brrrr

Great vid about Big Puntos Bog hog!

I love this series of shmup work shops! I've been thinking a lot about scoring systems since playing mega man 1 because that game has a famously bad scoring system. For my channel, I'm trying to interview other content creators about game development/design. Would you be interested in an interview??

@boghogSTG

Жыл бұрын

Hell yea sounds fun! I'll ask Mark for your deets

There are two parts of the score system, the aesthetic part, and this is either in the counter for the numbers, or it may be in the HUD box, or it may be in the character itself, either a glow or something like that that has graphic indications instead of the number, The second part is the division of laws, and here it has many types and forms such as multipliers and combos, snowball (every increase means a greater increase), these are the basic forms of points and the most important thing that most developers are not good at, and it is the key point is how to lose these points or this combo, etc. For example, the combo system needs something to build the combo and something to destroy it. The more combos, the easier it is to destroy it, and so on for the rest of the game. The direct relationship between destruction and construction requires understanding and experience for the player’s psyche. The snowball system also, each system needs to be studied. Its main purpose is to explain to the player how to play the game, and also to make the player basically build a plan, and this is the essence and concept of game design. There is a good free game on tours that makes a good scoring system. I advise you to try it. It's called Knightmare Tower. ( Google Translation )

@boghogSTG

Жыл бұрын

Yea and even though I didn't say this in the vid but it's a very useful exercise to try & relate scoring systems to regular mechanics in games. Racing games are a really useful comparison for me, because a car has a lot of different functions which aren't isolated but rather affect each other - everything you do with the car will affect its weight distribution, accel/braking affects steering and vice versa, the way you take one corner will dictate what options you have available for you for the next one, etc. It's a complex tightly related system where everything has tradeoffs, and it's all channelled into one purpose - optimization. Because optimization = speed, and speed can be felt, all these different relationships within a car can be FELT. You don't need to study anything or look at the speedometer to know if you're going faster or slower, you just feel it.

@ALmt5lf

Жыл бұрын

@@boghogSTG The game is nothing but a group of interacting mechanics with each other, the laws come to add meaning to these mechanics, the mechanics of the 2d aircraft games are simple, so you find that the developers put the greatest burden on the laws related to points and their shapes, as I mentioned previously, the problem is that the motivation patterns of the human psyche must be understood, as they are You like sequencing, storing and stacking, and we can understand that and build on it in games. I mean by all of this that we should not make the scoring system just a number at the end of the round. Thank you, my friend (it's a Google translation, so sorry for some mistakes)

@boghogSTG

Жыл бұрын

@@ALmt5lf Hell yea, its all about those underlying principles! After all, everythings just a bunch of score in code anyway, just a matter of how you hide it

Great!

I like zis Hog! Great video! I find Dodonpachi's YOU LOSE THE ENTIRE COMBO thing really punishing, in my games usually the HITS/COMBO just starts dropping after a while of not attacking and it can be picked back up by simply attacking again. It halves if the player takes a hit. Simple as :)

@boghogSTG

Жыл бұрын

Yeah same, overly punishing systems drive me up the wall but then again DDP and DOJ are some of the most popular scoring games so maybe the excitement IS worth it at extremely high levels

These are fantastic videos. Do you have any insights on sound effects?

@boghogSTG

Жыл бұрын

Thanks! Honestly I haven't thought about SFX very much but here are some things : 1. A "bullet hits enemy" SFX is really useful cuz it helps player gauge where the enemy's at without having to look away from the bullets 2. Having tiers/types of sfx for different enemy types (popcorn vs elites) helps players understand what they just killed 3. Like with VFX you should view SFX as feedback - make sure the player knows what's making the sounds you're playing, otherwise it becomes meaningless aural clutter 4. Using lots of different layers with varying ADSR settings is great. I also love just turning on record while playing with VST knobs and modulating them in real time, then chopping up parts that sound cool 5. Gotta watch your sfx' bass/midtones/treble balance - you only have so much room in the different frequency ranges before things start to blend together instead of sounding really nice & clean 6. IMO screw the naturalistic approach - look at older anime especially mech anime (Gundam, VOTOMS, even Evangelion) - sometimes the sounds were completely abstract nonsense but it was awesome 7. Lots of different sfx for enemy states and such (fly in, open up, charge laser, shoot) make games feel a lot more alive

I myself am working on a Bullet Hell called Sonic Danmaku where you play as Sonic characters, and its scoring system is based on the one in the Genesis Sonic games The ring bonus works just like it does in the Genesis Sonic games. At the end of the level, you score 100 points for every ring you have by then (ex. 420 rings would get you 42,000 points) Just like in the source material, it's there to encourage you to avoid taking hits. Your main way to get rings is destroying a tanky badnik (or depleting a boss's life bar), as that clears the screen, turning all the bullets on there into rings. (Your spindash can one-shot them in most cases, but can be dangerous to use, as it locks you in place and can send you careening into a bullet (though there are ways to play around that, as Sonic can use his S3&K Insta-shield to phase through them, and Tails and Knuckles can cancel their spindash to deflect bullets) And this is a Bullet hell, so this will likely be your main source of points, especially later on with higher bullet density. Grazing bullets gives you 10 points every 2 frames (150 points/sec), regardless of how many bullets you graze (because Sonic likes the thrill of taking this kind of risk) Destroying a Badnik starts a chain that acts as a score multiplier for Badniks specifically (the first one scores 100, the second 200, the third 300, so on, until you get to the 10th onward, which scores 1000 points (on top of that, each life bar of a boss scores 5x as much as a regular Badnik, up to 5000 points)) Think of the Combo meter in Pizza Tower for how it works. (If you're unfamiliar with Pizza Tower, the combo meter in Sonic Danmaku advances when you destroy a badnik, and has a 4-second timer which resets when you destroy another badnik, each point of damage you deal adds 0.05 second to the timer, taking a hit takes off 2 seconds, and dying resets the combo) I was thinking of making the levels not auto-scroll like most shmups do, but rather it would scroll at your own pace like the official Sonic games, so there are time limits for scoring purposes. When you get to the boss fight (and with each life bar you deplete during the fight), you score 10,000 points for every minute left in the timer, then 100 for every second remaining (ex. If the timer reads 4:20, you'd get 42,000 points, but most time limits for levels are ~1-2 min, and for bosses they rarely go over 1 minute per life bar) When the time runs out, in the level itself, your score is locked until you get to the boss fight, and you get no time bonus. As for the boss fights, the boss just advances to the next phase with no time bonus (and no screen clearing, except in specific cases where you're supposed to weather the storm) if you run out of time. Scoring 50,000 points, having your ring counter hit a multiple of 100 (or the cap of 999), or hitting a secret 1-up box all earn you an extra life, or if you're already at the cap of 9 lives, you instead score 10,000 points. (This one's mainly to address a minor pet peeve of mine where the game has a life cap so nothing happens when you get an extra life while you're at this cap, and I believe 10,000 points is appropriate, and it adds an effective 1.25x score multiplier while maxed out, which I like) There’s also Special stages, which work like Bonus rounds in Touhou, where you fight a harder version of the boss you just beat, or another entity that's similarly stronger. In this special stage, you can no longer retrieve any rings you lost, and dying just once ends the special stage (instead of taking a life). Clearing this special stage successfully gets you 10,000 points (40,000 for the 7th) a Chaos emerald, an extra life (or another 10,000 points if you're capped out), and a second Ring bonus. Basically they're optional, crazy difficult, but very rewarding challenges. It uses many of the same numbers as the Genesis Sonic games, but since you can collect way more rings, especially later on, your scores can get much higher, possibly reaching the millions if you're good enough. It's a work-in-progress, so I'll need to actually implement enemies and bullet patterns and do some playtesting. I'll update this as I change the scoring system throughout the game's development. Edit: Clarified a few things, like it being a manual-scrolling shmup, mentioning the Spindash, re-ordered a few things to add context

@boghogSTG

Жыл бұрын

I dunno what to do with most of this info because it's devoid of context. Grazing seems disproportionately lucrative - danmaku games have hundreds if not thousands of bullets, it seems that grazing just 10 bullets for a second will be more lucrative than chaining enemies, and that's not a rare scenario in most danmaku shmups. The enemy chaining is self explanatory but what I don't understand is how speed plays into this? What does a time bonus mean in an autoscrolling shmup? And if your game has a system for it, shouldn't that be the first thing you explain? In general I'd recommend thinking/describing scoring in terms of the game plan you want to encourage instead of these separate systems. It's easy to get lost in teh sauce throwing random systems into one big scoring soup, even if they don't make for any kind of fun coherent gameplay.

@OhCrapI_He

Жыл бұрын

@@boghogSTG I actually saw that first issue while I was playtesting the way Grazing worked. I tried to make it 10 points per bullet, but I saw a bug where the game was counting each bullet every frame, so your score went up ludicrously high just by grazing bullets, so I changed it so it's more like Radiant Silvergun's grazing (the game checks every frame to see if any bullets are close enough and awards you 10 points if that's the case, regardless of how many bullets there are). Then I decreased the rate of the points because it was previously 300 pts/sec, greatly overshadowing the time bonus (Why get 10k points for defeating a boss with a minute left on the time limit when you can graze for all that time and get 18k instead?) So now it's 150 pts/sec regardless of how many bullets you're grazing. Still more than the 100 pts/sec time bonus, but grazing for a full minute now gets you 9000, which is less than the time bonus would score for that minute (and all the while you risk losing all your rings), so this change encourages you to graze bullets until you get close to a X:00 threshold (ex. On a Boss with a 1:30 time limit, you'd ideally graze and deal damage for 30 seconds, then land the finishing blow for a 10,000-point time bonus, and 30 seconds of grazing would get you 4,500 points (not to mention the potential 5,000-point bonus from the chain)) The 10k points for not having enough room for an extra life you earned, the rings, and even the forgiving chain system are there to encourage you to avoid taking damage. As for speed, you have a Spindash move that deals more damage than most if your weapons, but if you're not careful, you'd send yourself careening into a bullet (though this can still be played around, as Tails can clear bullets with his tails at the cost of canceling his spindash, and Sonic has the Insta-shield from S3&K with split-second Invulnerability) As for the levels themselves, I was considering not having it auto-scroll, but now that I think of it, I could implement a Caravan system so defeating enemies quickly has you progress more quickly, too. Edit: On second thought, I'll have manual scrolling I'm mostly spitballing ideas. I'll edit the original comment as I playtest the game and find what works and what doesn’t.

@OhCrapI_He

Жыл бұрын

@@boghogSTG Just edited my original comment for better clarity. TL,DR: How to score points Speed through the level, defeat enemies quickly using your weapons and the risky Spindash when appropriate, Clear bullets by defeating tanky enemies and they'll all turn into rings, take some time to graze some bullets or find secrets, and most importantly, don't get hit, as if you do, you'll lose your rings. Powerups like the Shield can help out quite a bit

I thought it would be cool to have a “ rank” system where you can slow down the scrolling of the screen by peppering the enemies with shot to make them “ angry” And make them Pump out buttons of homing bullets filling the screen until you can barely move and then you could cash in the bullets to gems with either the large enemy kill or maybe a bomb. I would also like the vertical map to have a tight winding route channel that takes flying / driving skill to navigate without touching the walls. Similar to the games where you have a loop on an electric wire . It would make the game somewhat similar to a top Down driving game in sections . You could even have short reverse thrusters and thrust back through sharp diagonal channels .

@boghogSTG

Жыл бұрын

Yea would be pretty fun to have that type of rage system + dynamic scrolling, dynamic scrolling as a whole is something shmups havent messed around with that much and they should

hi, hope the ps4 release of gunvein is soon. I did think it was soon after the switch. And if there's a physical I'll sure will get it ! I'm not a collector except for cave games, m2 releases or really good games. Anyway , great job !

@boghogSTG

Жыл бұрын

Gotta check NGdev's twitter/facebook for updates on that, they're in charge of physical releases

o hell yeah

even games that don't have an explicitly designed scoring system end up having an implicitly designed one -- which is time, speedruns. maybe it's an exercise for the viewer to determine, with the help of this video, how time can be a good or a bad "scoring system"...

@boghogSTG

Жыл бұрын

Yeah most games without a scoring system leave a scoring-shaped hole wide open for better or worse. In some ways maybe its better though cuz games "designed for speedruns" tend to completely miss the point

Great ! Sidequestion : do you have any idea when we can expect gunvein on the ps4 or xbox ? I hope their will be a fysical release , waiting for it like a cave release 🙂 Are you working on a shooter at the moment ? I've played the demo, plays and looks great ! Maybe it's too much of a niche , but I don't understand Cave ? They have masterpieces that would do ( and still do m2 )very good I think.

@boghogSTG

Жыл бұрын

No clue but I do know they're coming. Physical release will def be a thing on the switch, not 100% sure about ps4/xbox though Mechanical Star Astra's on hold since the artist is busy with a huge project, in the meantime I'm working on a shmup/beat em up hybrid, been posting progress vids on twitter pretty regularly CAVE's situation is pretty grim to the point where even if their games do well it won't even make a dent in their debt spiral, The Electric Underground has a nice vid on their finances that you can check out

What do you use for the robotic announcer voice?

@boghogSTG

2 күн бұрын

It's some old text to speech from a few years ago that I found googling for TTS, don't think I can find the site now but any one will do. Then just take the voice, chop it up to make it sound more robotic if it doesn't already (cut off the very end of words & move words together to give it an unnatural rhythm), copypaste the track & pitch down one of the copies and very slightly desync it. I think that's basically all

score

@boghogSTG

Жыл бұрын

scor

Hey Boghog, do you recommend Kid Icarus: Uprising? That games looks interesting but I don't want to randomly put massive games on my 4gb meme card.

@boghogSTG

Жыл бұрын

Yup, less so for the rail shooter parts and more for the TPS parts but still

@soratheorangejuicemascot5809

Жыл бұрын

@@boghogSTG awww. The rail shooter parts are the one I wanna try the most. Ohh well time to play "Criminal Girls" instead.

How many takes did you do to record this?

@boghogSTG

Жыл бұрын

A lot, it's a bunch of cut up & duct taped together takes