July 2021 Shmup Club - Project Starship X

[Golem]

Lunchtime thoughts -

Playing well means grinding the mad events into long-term memory. This really cuts at the core of the genre itself. A scrolling screen will express challenges gradually by a movement of space. Something flies into view, and the player has a certain time frame to react. A core feature of STGs is the fact that things take time to happen because they have space to fly through, and that time is when the player forms a response. The fact that mad events flash onscreen instantly means that your reaction needs to be entirely pre-baked. I needed to remember right away which mad event I had and position myself accordingly.

There were a few other ways that the game worked against learning. A large amount of the variety came in the different flight paths that eyeballs would take through the screen. I'm pretty sure they only go one way, but unless you have memorized each shape of warning signs, you won't know where the eyeballs will appear until you see the eyeballs enter the screen. The large amount of variation also means that a good portion of the game's complexity is wrapped up in different courses that eyeballs can take.

Contrast that to Star Soldier, where different flight paths are reflected in different enemy sprites, and there are fewer types.

The warning signs in general were something I needed to adapt to. It's easy to understand how something moves through space by watching it move through space. Like, there's pedagogical value to just seeing an enemy move. The warning signs run counter to that, where the game signals the space that something will occupy, but not the timing associated with that space. It's an interesting method of communication that I haven't fully wrapped my brain around.

The dash move itself is very gracious. Internalizing the timing on this gives the player a large amount of leeway. Mad events and eyeball lines are all very particular, minute instances of memorization, but if you can hone the timing on the dash, that's a broad sort of memorization that applies across the game.

In the end, the character I preferred most was Garrett, since I think his default shot handles the largest number of challenges. You don't need to point-blank anything like with Shopthulhu or Gwen. You won't have any gaps like with John.

[FauxMacho]

My apologies, I got some time into this game but didn't get to posting here.

I appreciate the unique qualities about this game, but also I found certain parts to be extremely frustrating. The gamemakers made the choice to have a style of being obtuse, it works fine with incentivizing the player to pay attention and really learn the game, but the settings and scoring explanation are unnecessary limited.

I never fully built muscle memory to hitting dash when I needed to, I really wish I could have mapped it to a different button in the settings. As I type this I realize I think on the system level on the Switch I could remap buttons, but I totally forgot about that new feature.

Either in the comments or on a stream I saw others liked tank, but I found it boring and tedious. Anytime I had the tank I was just ejecting to get around those enemies coming from the bottom and I never really got to unleash its firepower.

For the scoring, seeing how others are also confused, can I posit a guess? It's that the highscore and number at the top of the title screen is a sum of your loops. My tutorial score was right around 400,000. My score now is 762,940. I've gotten as far as Loop 3 Stage 5 (a full gravity down stage is brutal). So it seems to me the Highscore is the sum of the loops you've finished, with my first loop at 400k and my second probably being around 360k.