![]() ![]() Instead, the enemy AI literally performs actions at random, including shooting at you. This is long before game designers learned to use antics. Bullets come out of your gun barrel on your right hand, which makes sense but makes aiming really hard, especially since enemies can come from all around.You play as a soldier who can shoot a gun or throw grenades, the animations are hilarious, and you can even drive tanks! Nevertheless, it has significant flaws too: Front LineĪn early Taito game, this is a really underrated one with some neat ideas. ![]() Through the 80’s game makers added features - powerups, different weapons - and tweaked game mechanics, learning valuable design lessons. Overhead shooters have a long heritage one of the first arcade games ever, Gun Fight, had players duelling with a two-stick control scheme - one to move, the other to aim and shoot. Weapons that can shoot diagonally or seek are much more powerful. What does the lack of diagonal directions mean? More movement, faster action, and enemies that can shoot in the 4 directions are much more dangerous. Bosses really benefit from complex firing patterns.Ĥ-directional shooters: the most similar to 8-directionals. This has its perks, for example you can play with crowd control with simple, predictable AI, but scrolling shooter’s patterns have a lot to offer too. The challenge is to shoot at enemies moving and firing unpredictably before they overwhelm the player.Ī lot of 8-directionals go the tactical, emergent gameplay route, where AI is relatively simple and independent. Instead, it’s all about enemy design, including their movement patterns, firing patterns and so on. Map design is minimal many scrolling shooters have no walls or obstacles at all. Scrolling shooters: only being able to shoot in one direction has a huge effect on game design. For 8-directionals, there’s a greater emphasis on positioning range can also be a factor, but often produced by projectile speed. This means that twin-stick shooters’ primary tactical consideration is range. Some twin-stick shooters use the mouse to aim, which is extremely precise, and instead feature recoil. The limits in aiming also affects map design maps with walls that aren’t in the 8 directions are more awkward for 8-directionals.īecause twin-stick shooters often use analog sticks for aiming, they are imprecise over long range, and often feature auto-aim. ![]() The implication is, for 8-directionals, indirect-fire weapons like shotguns and seeking weapons are much more powerful. Movement is much less important, since you can shoot at any target from any position. Twin-stick shooters: here you can aim in any direction, not just 8. Let’s compare with its sibling sub-genres: Great games in this sub-genre understand this, and design accordingly: map design, to weapons, to enemy AI. It is this close relation between moving and shooting, and limitations in both, that creates very dynamic gameplay. You can freely move to dodge incoming fire, but doing so will affect your line of fire.Make tactical decisions whether to stay back and shoot in one direction, or charge in and shoot in many directions.The 8 directions means some, but not complete, freedom in engaging enemies around you. I think overhead 8-directional shoot-em-ups strikes a sweet balance between movement and shooting, between tactical play and arcade action. Small differences in game mechanics can mean big changes in gameplay. Fans of those sub-genres will understand how different they are each has different design lessons to learn. Sounds awfully specific, so people simply describe these games as top-down shooters or 2D shooters, which lumps them together with other sub-genres like twin-stick shooters ( Geometry Wars), scrolling shooters ( Gradius, most of the Touhou games), run-and-guns ( Contra), even games like Asteroids (which have tank-controls, and includes the Strike series or even the on-foot sections of 2D GTA). In a nutshell, it’s where you can move and shoot in 8 directions, from an overhead perspective. This mouthful of a sub-genre doesn’t get mentioned a lot. Bertram25 (of Valyria Tear and OpenDungeons) encouraged me to elaborate on some of my conclusions in a blog post, so here it is ! What are Overhead 8-Directional Shoot-em-ups? A while ago I started looking for similar games, looking for cool features I can steal, but also for where they weren’t fun, and why. One game I’m making is C-Dogs SDL, an overhead 8-directional shoot-em-up. To make better games, one can look for similar games (not only in the same genre), and see what worked and what didn’t. ![]()
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