[bluerevolverstg]

Hi there! danbo here.

Today we put up a short demo video of our adaptive difficulty (or RANK) system. Fans of Raizing games will probably know how this works to an extent, but here's the skinny on how the rank system will hopefully work on release :

There are 5 rank "levels".

Rank constantly increases at a gradual rate - destroying enemies and firing the special weapon makes it increase a little faster.

Collecting lots of score items makes it increase more dramatically.

Bombing neither increases nor decreases the rank.

Losing a life will always decrease the rank by at least 1 level, unless you're at the minimum rank level.

NORMAL mode locks rank to Lv1 and Lv2, HYPER mode locks it to Lv2 through Lv4, PARALLEL mode locks it to Lv4 and Lv5.

Bullet patterns are generally the only thing affected by rank, though there may be some surprising exceptions...

The 5 level system makes it easier for players to understand, and it makes designing bullet patterns around rank much easier. Rank systems are fairly common in manic shooters, though their actual effect on the game varies - and often it can be hard to get much info about them and how they work - so we hope this helps! Thanks for reading!

[bluerevolverstg]

April dev update

We had a brief stall in development, but now we're pleased to present a short clip of how the game's looking so far!

A small summary of what's going on:

3 shot types exist in the game now - narrow, wide and variable. Each type has its own focused behaviour instead of the laser.

Enemies now spew out score items when you destroy them with the special weapon! This makes it much easier to see how well you're doing, it makes it a little trickier to get all the points, and because everyone likes hundreds of items spewing out of enemies.

We've revamped a lot of the sounds and redone the bullet graphics - things are getting more readable.

Stage 2! This stage is a complex one, but still fairly down-tempo. There are lots of big fat enemies here, which means a lot of scoring opportunities. Watch out for YASUMI, the vengeful ship from the intro - so eager to teach you a lesson that you'll be under fire from both it and the regular stage enemies!

The boss, HASKEL, has a lot of break bonuses. Some for shooting a specific "limb", some for destroying them all, some for destroying as few as you can. The bullet patterns are getting a little bit crazier...

The player now gets a lot of hints regarding break bonuses. The relevant parts have a special reticle on them, and the player's bullets turn green when they hit a valuable area.

The big laser that used to be the focus weapon is now a special weapon in its own right. It needs a charge-up period, it slows you down and burns through ammo very quickly - not so good for scoring, but it burns through stubborn bosses very quickly if you can bring enough ammo.

We hope to do a video like this next month showing where we're taking the game next! Thanks for watching.

[bluerevolverstg]

Greenlit!

We got greenlit yesterday!

Thank you so much to everyone who voted and gave feedback - we can concentrate now on doing the best work we possibly can on making the full game.

For the curious, we ended up at 59% yes, 37% no, 4% ask later. 5,589 unique visitors and 2,151 yes votes. This is apparently a very good ratio for Greenlight, though it's still a complete mystery to us how the whole thing works...

[bluerevolverstg]

Greenlight!

We’re on Steam Greenlight now! We’re not planning to release until sometime in summer, but we’d like to make sure we get leaderboard/achievement stuff done right as well as get the unknowns out of the way - and we’ll be able to use Steam to distribute test builds to a select few elite players.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=380437841

If you’d like to help us out, your vote / signal boost is appreciated!

[bluerevolverstg]

Daily challenge!

Hi, danbo here again. First up, credit where it's due to our current superplayer!

@Van_Artic beat his best score as soon as woof finished drawing this, and is currently sitting pretty at a princely sum of 6434000. You can see one of his videos here, and if you're interested in a detailed scoring analysis on his part, here's a link.

So I talked a little about the scoring system last time, and so far the design on that seems sound. The first boss needs a break bonus on its third phase, I think... Anyway, this time I want to talk about some of the problems with releasing an authentic manic shooter these days and a system we hope to introduce to help with these problems.

The problem(s)

A first problem is that players crave variance. We live in fairly blessed times for games like this, a big part of the gaming audience is starting to rediscover the thrill of challenging run-based single-player games. A problem is that most of these are procedurally-generated games - "roguelike-likes", etc. Binding of Isaac, Nuclear Throne etc are fine with throwing some fairly unforgiving difficulty at the player sometimes - but they offer something of a different experience every time via giving the player random items or a random selection of perks, as well as partially or wholly randomly generated levels. I'm not such a fan of this type of game - the core gameplay takes a backseat to all the items/perks/etc too often and ends up being a little simplistic for my tastes, whereas often the biggest factor in a successful run is getting good luck with dropped items or generated map layouts. But it's true that players can feel a lot like they're falling into a problem of memorization when playing a difficult single-player game that isn't randomly generated, and I'm looking for ways to deal with that while still offering a tight, lovingly-tuned game.

A second problem is that highscores are difficult to make relevant for beginners. I believe we have a rich and interesting scoring system, but it's not much use if the player has no motivation to chase large numbers. This isn't a problem for players outside the genre either - even intermediate players often chase 1ccs (1 credit clears) and little else. This is fine, but it means they often overlook a big part of what makes these games so great! Extends (extra lives for hitting scoring thresholds) help to a point, but usually the highest threshold can be hit without any regard for scoring by the end of a run. Games with extends every 1 million points etc usually treat those extra lives as tools to be used rather than a real margin of error.

The third (and the most obvious) problem is that the difficulty of these games is truly daunting. Bullet hell has a reputation for being difficult, and it's a well-earned one. Reflexes, projectile prediction, nerves of steel and a solid strategy are all required to prosper in manic shooters - something newcomers will not be used to! It is important to come up with something that's not either complete dumbing-down of the game for the lowest common denominator or simply clamming up and shouting "get good!" Novice mode and our "player analysis" (more later) feature will help, but it's still expecting the player to clear a big difficult chunk of game. I would ideally like something that gradually trains the player in a friendly way to help them achieve excellence.

The solution

The solution I have for this is a daily challenge structure as an extra mode - available from the start. Alongside a standard 5-stage-with-loop arcade mode (which will now and forever always be our #1 priority!), we will offer a challenge that changes every day. The player gets a score target, a set of stages and a "special condition". The player can try the challenge as many times as they like. A "special condition" is something akin to a small, alternate game mode. Some examples might be :

Boss rush!

Special weapon only!

Bombs only, but you get an extra one every 100000 points / 10 seconds!

The game difficulty rises incredibly quickly! Hold back the tide!

Bullets fade as they get closer to you!

This will let us dabble with a lot of novel, experimental mechanics without committing the whole game to them. On clearing a daily challenge, the player gets a star/medal item - they can then use these to unlock small extra features like palette swaps, ship colours, art galleries, etc. The player can't grind the same challenge over and over again for more stars (though stars can always be acquired by clearing the main mode), and nothing gameplay-related will be locked behind such a system. Also, for communities or groups of players, previous challenges can be replayed, replay files can be shared, etc.

My hope with this system is that :

We can offer players a wide variety of gameplay styles without compromising on the quality or tight design of the core game - using dynamism to frame the existing game in new, interesting ways.

Players can have official, specific score targets to hit - offering the binary "I did it!" gratification of a 1cc while encouraging them to explore and master the scoring system.

By offering a variety of stage selections and by the simple fact that some challenges will be easier than others, I hope to get players used to playing all stages in all kinds of situations. This way, when they take on the arcade mode, it becomes a problem of joining up the dots for things they learned while doing daily challenges.

My goal with Blue Revolver is to create a rock-solid, deep game for manic shooter enthusiasts and to help newcomers aspire to greatness with a low-investment, dynamic extra mode - rather than to dumb the whole game down or to leave it all to the mercy of a random number generator. I can't think of many other games that have tried something like this, but I think it's an ideal system for solving these problems. What do you think?

[bluerevolverstg]

Flourish!

Hi. My name is danbo, and I’m the programmer for Blue Revolver. Given how small our team is, that conveniently puts me in the role of “game designer” too, so I’ll be posting on this dev log about some of the design challenges and mechanics we hope to have in this game.

Scoring systems are tricky beasts. They make up so much of the character of a shmup/STG, but are difficult to make relevant in the eyes of a layman. The easiest-to-understand systems generally rub me the wrong way, whereas a lot of my favourite systems are difficult for beginners to understand. People brush off the decline of shmups as the result of a genre gone too hardcore, too stagnant and focused on the small things - but I simply think that the genre has not been given a fair shot outside of Japan for quite some time. And given how surrounded we are by truly stagnant, “hardcore”, incomprehensible games that have no problem capturing the interest of players - I simply think the solution is to make the genre easy to get into and easy to understand without sacrificing depth. And while I have a few special ideas to help with that for the newest of the new (to be examined in later blog posts!), the root of all this has to be the scoring system.

The flourish system

The shmup concept I had floating in my head for a few years was the “flourish” system. The idea is simple - short, fast chains ended by a violent, cathartic action. This action cashes in the chain, and has to be built up again.

To be more specific to the way it works in Blue Revolver - the player can build up a chain by destroying enemies in quick succession to a maximum of 8. Once a chain is built, using the special weapon “locks” the chain to that value for a short while (currently roughly 3 seconds, timings will likely be made stricter in the finished game) - and the point value of all enemies destroyed with the special weapon is subject to a multiplier respective to the value of the chain. Going from 8x to 64x. Once those 3 seconds are up, the chain is dropped and must be rebuilt.

I was looking to create a scoring system with the following properties, and I believe the flourish mechanic delivers on them :

I wanted a system that rewards confidence and consistency more than perfection. Basic chaining mechanics like those seen in DoDonPachi and Guwange are what I would describe as “perfectionist” systems - there is a very clear condition to do things absolutely perfectly. Every time you drop the chain it’s a big, inevitable disappointment. And while rote memorization isn’t much more necessary to do excellently than in other scoring systems, it’s very easy for new players to get that impression - “oh, if I want to do well, I have to memorize exactly where all the enemies are going to come from…”. Ketsui’s system is well-known for encouraging aggressive, confident play - and if you make a small screw up, it’s exactly that. However, if you keep your confidence and try to play consistently, you don’t lose out hugely. I’m more interested in a system that cares about the moments of brilliance the player has more than their occasional mistakes. It’s for that reason that I’m reluctant to have end-of-stage lives/bombs remaining bonuses (though that is in the demo, simply to give a bigger range of potential highscores.)

I wanted a system that would let us play around with fun weapon types. The artists and I seem quite good at making and polishing high-energy visuals, and we’re very interested in looking into alternate weapon types - particularly unconventional ones. Because this is all about how and when you use your special weapon, this will let us make a lot of cool weapons that might be too flashy or complicated for regular usage. Naturally, some weapon types will be better for scoring than others, but I don’t see this as a flaw. Beginners might opt for a weapon with more defensive utility, eventually switching to something with offensive power, and finally chasing the high scores with rewarding, finesse-based weapons.

The current special weapon is pretty to look at, simple and fun to spray around, and fairly ammo efficient. At some point in the future, the laser will probably become a special weapon in its own regard - hopefully making the game a simpler 3-button affair.

I wanted to establish a classic score/survival tradeoff in a simple to understand way. The tradeoff for players between ensuring survival or trying to maximize score is always present but not always perceived. I’m a big fan of Ibara’s hadougun as something that can be used for great effect in scoring, or simply to help ease the burden of a tricky section. It’s been good to watch beginners play the game, mostly saving their special ammo for tricky enemies. Extends (extra life awarded for hitting a particular score threshold) every X points or so should hopefully encourage players to chase high scores by conserving their ammo for good scoring opportunities.

On boss scoring

A strength of the flourish mechanic is that it can translate well enough to stuff like boss milking (exploiting repeatable scoring opportunities in a boss, like destroying enemies it spits out) - bullets get cancelled with the same 8-64x mechanic as destroying enemies, so racking up an 8-chain before making the boss start another phase gives a good bonus. But that’s not really enough. I’m a fan of the intricate bosses seen in games like Battle Garegga - destroying particular parts at particular times with particular weapons giving bonus points, often altering the behaviour of the boss. I wanted to add something that would encourage players to get familiar with and deconstruct the bosses while offering good feedback for new players. The “BREAK” bonus is something I hope to implement for most midbosses and boss phases, where destroying particular parts in certain ways earns the player more points. The midboss in stage 1 awards a break bonus for destroying both of the wings in quick succession without destroying the core - and there’s hopefully no doubt whether you did it or not, since “BREAK” flashes up on the screen. The first phase of the boss also has a break bonus, but it’s maybe a bit less obvious. Because power and precision is required to reliably get these bonuses, hopefully it will be another way to use the special weapon.

With Blue Revolver, I hope to make a scoring system that’s understandable, deep and - most importantly - enjoyable. The scoring system of any shmup should reflect the feel of the game in question - this is our rough, energetic attempt at a big game about flashy bosses and flashier weapons, and I feel the system we have reflects that. I’m no layman, but it’s been a while since I graced the top of any online high score table, so obviously I invite all criticism - though please keep in mind that most of the exact numbers and timings involved are by no means final. Thanks for reading!

@__danbo