Influenced by BORDER DOWN, R-TYPE, LAST RESORT, Magic BLACK is a Horizontal shmup that mixes G.Rev influenced bullet pattern design with gameplay that emphasizes the use of Force-type mechanics to absorb enemy bullets, while also giving your enemies the same mechanics.
Magic BLACK represents an appreciation of the late 90s/early 00s console stg as memorizer, of the accumulation and implementation of knowledge via routing and the optimized use of options and weapon properties to multiply score.
Story

Character

System

Scoring

Rank

Planned Features

Brief FAQ

Design philosophy, trivia, and dev info

My favorite shmups and a lot of Border Down talk

Return to index

SYSTEM ⇱
Magic BLACK is a 4 button game where you make use of an orb that fires bullets, cancels enemy bullets, and absorbs enemies. Like R-Type and it's clones, this orb can be moved into a variety of positions, and use of this Force is key to playing the game. The front position is closer to a spread style, and can be angled. The back position is highly focused, and purely based on your position on the screen.

((Buttons can be remapped))

Tap Fire button (A)((Z)) - Fire a spread shot. The style of this shot is determined by the position the Force is in. When bits are active, each of the four possible bullets will target a random enemy.

Hold Fire button (A)((Z)) - Fire a focused shot. The angle of this shot is determined by the position the Force is in. When bitd are active, the shots fire straight ahead, according to orb position.

Press Laser button (B)((X)) - Fire a single laser shot straight ahead. Uses a flat amount of absorbed energy.

Hold Laser button (B)((X)) - Fire a large, continuous laser straight ahead. Holding this drains absorbed energy. Can absorb bullets, but bullets absorbed do not get added to score, though they are added to rank.

Press Force Button (C)((C)) - Swap Force position between front and back. The position of the Force determines the style of shot.

Press Support button (D)((V)) - When available, call upon your support to absorb bullets. This provides an end stage score bonus, but also lowers rank, which lowers the score for killing enemies. Knowing when, and where, to use this, could drastically affect the overall score of a run.

Bullet absorbsion heavily influences player weaponry, extends, and overall power:

Extends are added for every 50 bullets up to 450 (8 extends)

Number of bullets fired increases at 50, 150, and 250 (4,6,8 bullets). Above 250, bit options appear at 350-375 and 400-425 (single-double shot).

Tap firing the laser decreases the bullets by 5. Holding drains it at a flat rate of 1 per second.

Getting hit at above 150 (2 extends/3 lives) lowers the number of absorbed bullets at a rate of 50 * floor(1+Rank). Below lowers at a flat amount of 50.

Absorbed bullets are held for the course a single credit. Upon continuing, the stored number of bullets returns to 150 (2 extends/3 lives). It is important to note that bullets absorbed for power are cached separately from bullets absorbed for scoring. These absorbed bullets are carried over into the next stage, but bullets absorbed for score return to zero each new stage.
SCORING ⇱
Scoring is influenced by BORDER DOWN. Each enemy gives a flat amount based on their total health, and the weapon you kill them with modifies the final score.

Main weapon - x100
Tap laser - x500
Tap laser at full health (popcorn) - x1000
Hold laser - x250
Hold laser at full health (popcorn) - x500
Killing enemy with Force - x1500

This is further multiplied by Rank, which fluctuates between 0 and 2, yielding a score higher or lower than the raw score.


At the end of the stage, the number of bullets absorbed by the Force are multiplied by a flat amount, which is added to the score. If the support was used, the amount of bullets it absorbs is multiplied to the score, and this is added to the score for the final score

Number of bullets x 5000
Score x Support Absorb (amount between .01 and 1)
end of stage score screen
An example of scoring at stage end

PLANNED FEATURES ⇱
5 Arcade stages with multiple levels of difficulty: Easy, Normal, Hard, and BLACK

3 classic continue styles to enjoy the game with: FREE PLAY, 1CC, and 1 USD

A practice mode featuring stage and boss select, with the ability to fine tune rank and power options

A 2 minute caravan mode featuring BLACK in the style of Zaxxon and Viewpoint

A late 90s/early 00s sample based soundtrack influenced by 90s Zuntata (Yack., OGR, TAMAYO) and Toshiya Yamanaka by SPIT


Some example tracks below
Brief FAQ ⇱
Q. Why 4:3? Will you put in an image to cover black bars (like in ports of 4:3 games to modern consoles/pc)?

A. This is spiritually a Naomi/Atomiswave era concept, just not made on the hardware because homebrew is limiting in terms of accessibility. I like 4:3.
I don't like adding art to the side, it's distracting. Black bars are better because they don't draw your eyes away from the action on the screen. "Wasted screen space" is a fallacy, a well designed game uses the screen space it requires, no more, no less. You're staring at the center of the screen when you play anyway.


Q. What's with the slowdown in some sections?

A. Slowdown to a certain degree is intentional. I picked my engine and methods with it in mind. To some degree it's an anti-danmaku thing to force me to design stages creatively, but it also provides some leniency at high rank when a lot of bullets are being spawned.


Q. Will there be replays?

A. Unknown. There's too much variation in random ranges. Maybe I'll rework the seeds so make them replay safe, but that's not on my mind right now.
STORY ⇱
IN THE LATE 21ST CENTURY, hermetic knowledge became known to bring upon strange magical powers in those attuned to esoteric practices.

THELEMA became the terms to describe these powers, which allowed adherents to manifest orbs of radioactive energy, called FORCE.

FORCE emits deadly particles that eat away at all matter, and only FORCE can negates these particles.

IN THE 22ND CENTURY, technology developed to augment natural FORCE. Weapons were built to make use of the power of FORCE without the need for an adherent of THELEMA.

To combat this rise of global terrorism, the Worldwide Independent Taskforce for Criminal Hunting was formed...


RANK ⇱
Rank plays a major role in much of the gameplay, affecting score, bullet speed, and overall enemy formations. It is indicated on a bar on the bottom right of the screen. Where it begins is determined by the difficulty level.


Score * Rank
Bullet speed * (.45 + Rank)

Enemy formations are modified by rank in a few possible ways

Number within wave + (X * rank)
Spawn time between each within wave - (X * Rank)
Number of waves + (X * Rank)

Rank is modified by absorbing bullets, absorbing enemies, using the support, and dying

Absorbing bullets with force + .5%
Absorbing enemies + 1%
Support active - Rank * .15% per second
Dying - 1/2 or 1/4 of current rank, depending on difficulty level

In order to adjust for the player's high potential bullet power when absorbing bullets, when the number of bullets absorbed is above 200, it modifies enemy health on spawn at a rate of:

HP + floor((RAWHP * .001)*Absorbed bullet cache)

For example, an enemy with 100 base health will have an additional 20 health at 200 bullets absorbed. This applies to bosses, with the intention of creating a second layer to Rank control that is also distinct from the Rank value.


Due to the possibility for infinite milking, boss fights have a timer. When the time goes into the negatives, the fight continues, but Rank drains, negatively affecting the player's possible boss score. The value it drains is the same in Normal and Hard mode. There is no timer in Easy mode. When playing in BLACK mode, where Rank is fixed at max at all times, the player's bullet cache will drain after timeout, weakening the shot and removing extends.


Additional comments ⇱
I'm pretty much a cyber hermit and don't really like joining communities that much (I'm an old arcade player, and I like to act and play like that, i.e. the "save that shit for nationals" type, but less gatekeep-ish. I don't talk casually and I don't really like posting footage, like a lot of old NA/JP players back in the day, and I don't care much for people who seek clout by being good. You play the game for the game, and in the games I play, I can recognize the people who care enough to really play the game. I respect everyone who plays seriously and want to post their runs, I just personally like to keep to myself.), so I won't really run around and post my work on boards or in servers, so for the 15 people who see this, I'll leave some info about my gameplay design thoughts and reasons for developing something at all in the first place, at least to just to give you an idea of my angle. I have a more jumbled design document, so I'm treating this as a public expression of intention. Please don't spam me, but if you have anything you want to say, go back to my mugen page and get my email or just find me on discord as "whimskull". I'm in some STG servers, mostly just to help edit the Border Down (one of the greatest games ever made, go play it) page on the STG Wiki (:P), and I don't really interact (and I'm really only active in the Fatal Fury server(s)), but I'll respond to things if you ask me.
Why do this
No reason. I only want a place to combine all of the things I'm interested in--design, typography, mehcanics--into one thing. MUGEN is basically dead, and I don't really want to switch to IKEMEN, mostly because I'm a shitty hobbyist programmer, so a lot of my work is based on system specific workarounds. I'm willing to push boundaries, but in a programming pipeline it's not worth trying to reinvent the wheel, and I don't like being a code monkey. I want to work in one language, not have to swap between 10 bespoke ones. Despite that, I like arcade games. I'm not making a fighting game. Making MUGEN characters with unique systems gives you a good idea of the problem of that framework. The bugs in every KOF should be more understandable when you realize the time they had to make the game. My favorite game is Fatal Fury 3 (I haven't been playing a lot recently, but my FF bros know me), and you can tell that the dev cycle wasn't kind to the game. My REAL reason is I like the genre, I've been playing, at whatever level I am, shmups forever. I like arcade games. No bullshit. No frills. Just like a puzzle game or a lightgun game, there's no difference. A shmup is easy to start, but as we all know, it's hard to finish. I've put a lot of time into Border Down, more than I would care to admit. I'd like to try to throw down as well, since, as the Crimzon Clover dev said, in so many words: "if you start making a shmup, finish it, because no one is making these games anymore"

Yet, also, as those who are "creative people" know, when you make something, there is always something personal and intrinsic to you that comes out, and that's what makes it interesting to make things. The more I've put time into my projects, the more I realize that what I get from things is different from others, and that makes what I want to do more interesting, at the very least conceptually. I don't know if what I make will be good or bad, a masterpiece or just another game--the dreaded Euroshmup is still a design decision that matters to the developer--but I do know that I've put what I love and enjoy in these kind of games into it, and that's enough for me.
My design philosophy
What I'm interested in doing is working within the early 3D horizontal style, particularly in how perspective shifts were utilized, e.g. Einhander, Philosoma. My ideal would be something more like on the Naomi board, but my assets are probably sitting somewhere between the Saturn and Dreamcast. I also want to make a note that, while 16:9 in tate can make vertical games interesting, in horizontal games the 16:9 ratio, despite creating more space, actually instills less verticality into the game. You can see it in how much more grounded a lot of 16:9 fighting games feel vs those developed with 4:3 having what feels like more headroom (player size also increased in 16:9 games, like in Strive, which further demphasizes verticality). In shooters this also leads to an imbalance for enemy placement. For example, in Border Down, stage 4's descent feels much more impactful in 4:3 because the dimensions squeeze you into a limited space. If you compare it to vertical movement in a 16:9 game like Devil Engine, there's less space for enemies to appear directly above or below because the playfield is much more horizontal than vertical, and because eye focus is now lopsidedly directed to the horizontal space, placing enemy formations above and below causes them to appear too fast, as if from a blindspot, because there is just not enough space to really register their appearance. If you took a section from the part of Border Down stage 4 where a wave of enemies comes in from the right and is immediately followed by a mine formation directly below, this works in 4:3 because the distance each comes from their respective edges of the screen is roughly equivalent for the eye, but in 16:9, the wave from the right would travel further, and appear much more distant, whereas the mines will travel less in comparison and appear much closer to the player, which might feel a bit cheap and unreactable. A lot of the tricks in R-Type Delta, such as the falling beams in stage 4, also would be much more unfair in 16:9 due to where your eyes are directed by the horizontal playing field. Widescreen might be what people BELIEVE to be an improvement, but in reality, aspect ratio plays a very very big way into how players engage with games, and thus how developers MUST design them. I prefer 4:3.

Gameplay design sits squarely within a space where an R-Type clone is mixed with a Taito-style horizontal game. I'm not the biggest fan of the Toaplan style shot/bomb configurations, but I'm not totally hot on the full on console style multiple weapon configuration found in many classic examples of the horizontal, and especially 16-bit console, style, e.g. Gradius, Thunder Force, Axelay, etc. Static weaponry, but with lots of interactions possible based on the mechanics, is the ideal. The mechanical function of the beam in Border Down, Metal Black, and G-Darius is the platonic ideal; the manner in which the Force Pod interacts with the environment is the permutation of it.

Bullet patterns and enemy formations are designed to encourage macrododging instead of micrododging. This is for two reasons: primarily, my method for making the stages kind of makes terrain and physical obstacles difficult to design, so bullet patterns and enemies represent obstacles that force your into certain places; second, I just like how routing works in a lot of macrododging games, which is just built on a preference for horizontal games. [new comment for demo]Something I didn't comment on, but that matters, is that the orb absorb mechanics would render some standard patterns ineffectual. In R-Type style games this isn't an issue because there are extra bodies and obstacles, but I don't think I'll go all in on obstacles for various reasons. I initially looked to Eschatos for a solution, but I didn't think the shield was the same. In the end, I started playing Lords of Thunder on Super difficulty. I generally only played on hard, so when I started to have to figure out how to re-route the stages with suicide bullets, the lightbulb hit me. I really like how different this Thunder Force style of formation placement is. Lots of stuff in Lords of Thunder is very clustered and out of left field, sometimes in a bad way, but also if you play Thunder Force V, the patterns don't really feel like they fit within what we expect from the classic Gradius style of horizontal games. In Border Down, there's always very clear top and bottom wave routing, especially in certain stages like 1 and 3, but in Thunder Force games, the routing tends to be a bit more freeform, as far as I know, as I haven't played V enough to say. In Lords of Thunder, the routing is clear to me, but the suicide bullets on Super make it very interesting, and I like this style a lot because it makes your think a lot about how you want to position yourself (ketsui players are probably laughing reading this). When I do my Border Down runs, there are places where I recognized this sort of situation, but it's not as severe as in Lords of Thunder.[/new comment for demo]

[new comment for demo]This didn't necessarily deal with some existential problems I had with the system. Recently I've been thinking of maybe implementing some obstacles, so I needed to rethink this concept. I think it's important to force the player to work within the system you make, and this either determines, or is determined by, scoring. I already designed scoring, so for me the question is, how can I apply this to the concept? My solution is make suicide bullets mandatory, as in popcorn always shoot suicide bullets, whether or not you kill them. The problem with the concept of the R-Type clone is that it's too easy without powerups and checkpoints, so the pressure ends up lower. This older style of game emphasizes no miss, but that doesn't work in a game where I design the rank, extend, and scoring system to benefit suiciding. If suicide bullets are always in play, and I think the core quality of the game will be suicide bullet enemies mixed in with other types of enemies (I'll make them different enough visually), then you can't just camp one spot on the screen to absorb bullets, and that should naturally alter routing strategies.

There's a sort of "debate" in STG design where raw patterns and bullets over background design is better. This is, I believe, a Touhou influenced thing (and I don't mean this to throw shade). At a certain point in STG design, and what threw me off as an old school player for a while, pure pattern design became paramount, and contextual design started to disappear. When I talk about contextual design, I mostly mean how enemies and shots in horizontal games are designed around the playfield; whereas, in many doujin style games, whether Chorensha or Touhou or Samidare, the playfield doesn't exist. After a while, vertical games began to accentuate open space, which makes vertizontal pretty hard to work with, since there's too much open space in the 4:3 versus 3:4 rotation. I was looking at how Mars Matrix dealt with this, and the answer was more that the mechanics allowed for the devs to fill the screen at a rate higher than most vertical games. The only reason I bring this up is because I find this an issue, since Cave games deliberately design patterns around the stage: tank style enemies follow paths very clearly defined by the background. As a fan, and as an active player of Horizontal games, stage design, and how it flows, matters a lot for me. I actually believe in the crazy assumption that stages should be designed before the first enemy is tested. I mean I could just be a jaded boomer, but I couldn't imagine any classic hori not being determined by the bg. R-type, Pulstar, Metal Black, Thunder Force, Border Down... all of these games use the playfield as part of the identity of the game. Pattern and formation design follows the environment. Full stop.[/new comment for demo]

More explicitly, patterns are designed around two functions. The first is a certain G.Rev "house style" that I feel like appears in both Border Down and Under Defeat: the use of aimed slow single shots from popcorn, aimed three way split shots appearing in larger units, large units and bosses using large bodies of scattered shots, lots of long thin lasers, suicide bullets usually exploding into thick "shrapnel" shots, etc. A lot of what I'm interested in appears more in Border Down, but Under Defeat and Strania also have patterns like these to my limited knowledge of them.

The second key part of the pattern philosophy is to create something that APPEARS to be a pattern you can dodge through, only to find that not to be true. In the absence of terrain, bullets become terrain. The player can be tricked: dense patterns of small bullets will appear to be easier to dodge over scattered long bullets. In truth, they have the same hitbox, one simply looks longer due to the trail. The eye should be tricked as to disincentivize the micrododing encouraged in danmaku.

[new comment for demo]My patterns have changed a bit in each build. I'm now mostly focused on bullets being equivalent, but the unit type determines the pattern. What's bigger for me is trying to figure out how I should design formations and patterns with the very clear problem of the force orb canceling everything. It's like the potential issue with the beam in Border Down: here is a mechanic that can, if the game is made without thinking about this mechanic, be too easy. All of Border Down is designed around the beam, how and when you use it. That's what makes it such a fun and interesting game for me, and why I always come back to it, while I tend to not be as interested in other games for extended periods of time. A lot of classic 16-bit era horizontals also recognize problems of power in mechanics. The original Cotton, if you play well, lets you blow through the game, so the answer to trick the player is to use formations that come from unorthodox positions on the screen compared to a lot of newer games. Stage 4 has some formations like the flying fish that are ??? if the mechanics and the way Cotton's shot works are ignored, but if you account for fairy options and Cotton's wide spread at max power, then they're necessary to create challenge (and the game is still a bit easy :p). Some others don't. I actually think the use of free range in Thunder Force V is a bit tricky to first use in the same way directional changes in Under Defeat are kind of wonky on initial play, but with proper memorization Free Range is just flat out broken, and I imagine the devs just assumed the way it works would be difficult without memorization, which would be true for the standard casual player (Watching some non-Free Range runs of Thunder Force V is pretty cool, and it does make me want to really give it a go someday when I'm not spending all my time playing Border Down).[/new comment for demo]

This, paired with how gameplay and scoring encourages bullet eating, forced the player to think about macro routing over bullet dodging. It can be more lucrative scorewise to not kill enemies, but instead eat bullets. Some enemies might be worth killing solely because they release suicide bullets, but depending on how many bullets they release (partially influenced by rank), it might be better off not killing them with bullets, but with the Force weapons instead.

The position of the orb hitbox on the far edges of the character, with the player hitbox placed in the center in a very disjunct way, makes positioning much more important, and creating a sort of "grazing" similar to how you position the orb in R-Type style games. Grazing's risk/reward is determined by where the player can make a mistake, and the R-type style force orb places the bullet eating point at extremes that make positioning for it much more difficult.

Unlike Danmaku/Bullet Hell games, the core difficulty/quality of the game comes down to how the mechanics are used, rather than dodging patterns. Playing actively, i.e. using the mechanics, makes the game more difficult. Playing passively, i.e. not using the orb, will make the game less difficult. This play concept massively affects scoring, and scoring as a concept is key to the design. 1CC of this game is, hypothetically (since I haven't finished the game), easy. The Force allows you to brute force your way through patterns, but you have to commit to an orb position, and enemies spawn on both sides (and also many enemies attack at positions you cannot directly absorb, i.e. above or below). At base level, the concept is easy. Conceptually, the 1ALL of the original R-Type is easier than most games made after 2000. But the 1ALL doesn't mean much to me, because I'm not a 1CC hunter. I play very few games, and I play them to maximize my score (if a game doesn't really interest me to care about score, it better have some interesting level design, which is where my love for 16-bit games comes in--this also is where I don't find Touhou and it's ilk that interesting, but the last touhou game I thought was really interesting was Shoot the Bullet so I'm probably just a boomer). When I think about designing a game, the scoring possibility, and how this affects routing, is more important for me than anything else outside of gamefeel.

As an additional side note, I don't really like at a conceptual level, "danmaku," and I don't mean Cave, I mean the doujin worship. Extravagant patterns and flowery things distract from boring mechanics. Cave has good mechanics, a majority of the rest don't, and the term is just a blanket term for the genre for people who only played Ikaruga. I enjoy plenty of games with meh or bad mechanics, yet have interesting level design/enemy layout, but I don't really believe the doujin danmaku necessarily does that (though that's like saying someone's space invader clone isn't good). I still get a bit annoyed when I see that Under Defeat is called a "bullet hell" game, because I don't really see how you can look at G.Rev's design decisions and compare what are very sparse, aimed patterns that get amplified by where they position the enemy to even something even like ESPrade. There are very few times you could consider the screen filled with bullets in Under Defeat even compared to something like Guwange.

As for the system mechanics, I want to stress that the system is NOT a polarity system as in Dimahoo or Ikaruga, and it is NOT the shield style absorb system that's very popular right now, like in Drainus or Schildmaid MX (and maybe like in Space Moth?). I've never played any of these games, so my ideas have nothing to do with them. The system is very much based on how the Force pod "cancels" bullets in the original R-Type and in other R-Type "clones," i.e. Pulstar and Last Resort. The profile of the rocket itself was initially 1:1 the ship from Last Resort, though it changed with time. Not wanting to program all the crazy force pod movement gives me a system that is very indebted to this style of game, but with its own twists. When I initially began programming, it was really just R-Type + Border Down, but I started playing Last Resort and much of the positioning you do in that game with the not-Force pod to block bullets or kill enemies became incredibly influential on how I ended up programming how the Force interacts with enemies and bullets.

The use of "bits" came to me last. I initially didn't want options at all, but I realized that there wasn't necessarily a proper reward for absorbing bullets. In a game with powerups, score and drops are provided on kill, but in a game without powerups, what do you provide? 16-bit game design provides a possible solution, and I kind of drew my concept from Lords of Thunder, to power up the range of the player's shot, not just the power, and this also sort of appears with both Cotton's shot and options as they get stronger. Here, though, instead of making the player's shot more powerful, just increase the range, and therefore the opportunities, especially when it comes to bosses where you want to attack their force for laser opportunities.

I still needed some sort of mechanical use for absorbsion. The game needs a traditional powerup system, but using drops was not interesting to me for a game so focused on its core mechanics. The answer was to tie powerups into play itself, sort of like Cotton. Reusing how the bit concept was made, I decided to, like in many classic horizontals, work back in power ramping, though via the number of bullets, not base shot power. This also meant I could tie ALL of my mechanics to bullet absorbsion, including properly including a classic laser like in Metal Black and Border Down. It also sort of fixes the extend issue for me, because your lives are a resource for rank control, and you also can use the recovery orb after being hit to absorb bullets and enemies. I want there to be a possibility for strategic suicide while also making the game "no-miss" in theory, because the extends are more like weaponry than traditional lives, and you also burn through these extends when you use the laser, so to some degree, you're burning these extends as fuel for other weaponry. Overall, this also allows for me to make beefier, more challenging enemies because the highest possible level of play becomes akin to an R-Type game with full loadout.

The support ship is a response to lacking a traditional bomb in a game where the design causes bullet patterns and enemy formations can get pretty dense, as well as needing a tool that would allow for managing rank, because I don't really want suicide being the [only] optimal way of playing (though I will give out a decent amount of extends). Because it lowers rank, which damages potential score (unless you're playing on BLACK, where rank is fixed at max), the score multiplier was added to provide an interesting risk/reward and promote thinking about optimizing when and where to use it.

On the topic of difficulty, it's a way of providing options. I much prefer one level of difficulty that shifts as you play, but I'm aware of the casual player. Hard mode is the game as I intend it to be played, and much of the balancing is done around it. BLACK is an attempt at creating a separate Black Label shipped on the same pcb, so to speak. In any build before the final, it's to be treated as a novelty, and it won't be properly balanced until the final release. I'll need to tweak the rank system, but it offers a reason to use lives as a resource. I'm very clearly a big Border Down enthusiast, and I could talk about it for hours, but in short, I like how it combines scoring and resource management in both the weapon and life system. There's something similar to Yagawa games (and I mostly think of Batrider since I've really only played that one, and even then I'm not that great at it, but it applies to other games), though it's not just suiciding to just lower rank, but also using that suicide to raise your score. When you suicide and create a shield that eats bullets, you set up an opportunity to multiply your score. In Border Down, dying lowers rank, but playing a lower border also increases the score possibility, allowing you to border up to increase your rank, and thus your scoring possibility. Routing for score in the game works around when and where you border up and down. I assume in many Yagawa games this rank management is more mitigation (again, I don't play most of them, esp garrega), whereas in Border Down it's integral to routing itself.

Boss design is Border Down 6D, full stop. Any Border Down player knows that the 6D 1CC is insane. It's memorization taken to the next step, because you're working with your beam level and trying to optimize your score while also trying to get as much damage out of each interaction, looking to kill the third phase as close to the 0 on the timer as possible. It's the best boss fight in all of shmups, hands down; though, I'm not a Cave TLB player so I guess that opinion doesn't really mean much. What I mean by this is that there's a multidimensional aspect to it. Border Down allows for you hit anything from any part of the screen, so why not let the boss play with the screen as well? Some of the bosses in the game play with this, my favorites being the stage 3R and stage 4 bosses, which have you scramble all over the place. Games do tend to do the "boss that's the same size as you" trope, and even much more so since touhou, but danmaku, for all the weaving, isn't as intricate as 6D, and someone who hasn't played against 6D won't understand this. A boss without multiple phase patterns isn't a boss, it's just a midboss with a few extra bullet patterns. What I want from a boss isn't a giant body, or a weak spot, but something that moves and acts like I do, that plays like a mirror match in fighting games, something that plays by the same rules I do. Big things and complex patterns can be memorized, but that's not 6D, and that's my mentality, so if my stages are weak, I hope my bosses are wild and fun.

[new comment for demo]As I work more and get closer to a release worthy product, I really want to talk about the aesthetics. It's not important for game development as a whole, but at the same time, the arcade game is a visual medium, and many of the classics are known for their visuals as much as their gameplay. In addition, the details matter, and not just in enemy formations or shot type. In my opinion, someone who cares thinks very deeply about all aspects of the game--but perhaps I'm someone who thinks too much about this.

I'm highly interested in typography and page layout. William Morris's Kelmscott Press work is very big for me. This isn't a random circumstance, as when I lived in the East Bay, I got into the grind/pv scene there pretty hard (I even made some demos lmao). I always was into grindcore, but before then I wasn't able to associate with anyone due to distance, and after covid it became hard for me to go to shows due to venue closures and personal conflicts. There's something about grind/pv in the typography (a bad joke I like to pass around is that I can't see something with a blackletter font and just not think of some generic powerviolence band) and overall graphic design that's very different than hardcore. Hardcore design is a bit messy, very collage-ish, but grind/pv design is often pretty rigid--lots of straight lines (the classic double bar I use for the BLACK text is a classic powerviolence trait, and I proudly use it as an appreciation of my time in the scene). The straight black and white is also appealing for me. In typesetting I like the simple color spectrum of white, black and red. It's very classic; William Morris used it, classic Bible printing abides by it, and western calligraphy is defined by it. Most of my designs follow it to a degree, outside of those with color, and even in my calligraphy, I only use matte black and crimson india ink.

Aside from that, a lot of my aesthetic interests stem from two specific games: Killer 7 and Armored Core: For Answer. The rest comes from the classic SNK attract mode style, exemplified in KOF 98--an attract mode so iconic that I can close my eyes, see it, and instantly hear the audio. The design of Border Down matters to me, but it wasn't as fundamental for me as these games since I didn't play it until around 2010 (Actually, most of my aesthetics don't come from shmups, as much as I played them in the arcade). This style of hard, fast cuts, with strong typography, mixed with the very strong visual language of mainline SNK attract modes, is what I really want to emphasize.[/new comment for demo]
About me and some trivia ⇱
I like arcade style games and strategy games. I'm a JAMMA nut and I collect boards, though mostly SNK related ones. I spent years making things for MUGEN, but even though I still play them frequently, making fighting games is a bit stale for me now. I originally wanted to make a turn based strategy game using bwdyeti's Tactile engine, but it not being out of beta meant that not everything I wanted was possible yet through the editor. I spent a lot of time rewriting the source code, but I don't really do much front end programming anymore (as you can see from how lazily made this site is), so my Javascript is very rusty, which means I kind of just pretend I know how to do OOP. Being out of practice, and not knowing C# syntax at the time, made it take more time than I'd like at all, so I ended up spending time brushing up on general practice and picking up enough C# to make edits to the source code.

I am first and foremost a composer by training, so I like these types of games because the music is very important, and I like writing music for games because it's very much "music for use" which I think is very important. I love shmups as a "musical" genre, because you compose to the stage. As for my relationship to them, since I'm more openly a fighting game enthusiast of the SNK style, I like horizontal shmups a lot. I've been playing Border Down since probably 2010, and I've 1CC'd most of the routes except for the high scoring RYG Route and the overall 6D route, which always causes me to eat ONE CREDIT in phase 3 of that damn mirror match. Since I don't play the highest scoring route, I'm not really a score player that much, and I kind of don't really play for big scores, I just go for PBs. I play some other games for fun, but otherwise I wouldn't consider myself "good" at STG, I just like the games because they're well made and fun to play.

Originally, this game came to me in a dream as a Dominion Tank Police game where turn based strategy would lead to STG moments instead of just battle animations, but due to various circumstances I decided to not make a game on the ground, and also the gameloop wasn't really that effective for me. The core mechanics of that original system are part of everything still though, and a lot of the code was carried over into the newer idea. The name reflects this a bit: it's a reference to Metal Black, but also to Shirow's manga, Black Magic. Aside from Shirow there's some legally distinct designs borrowed from some mecha franchises I like, but I won't name them ;)

The name also reflects other influences in Cotton and Magical Chase, with the character being prominent in the scene compared to a ship. The game's "magical" content is sort of a cheeky reference to this, filtered through a more esoteric lens.
My favorite shmups and some more personal anecdotes
Border Down
R-Type
Cotton: Fantastic Night Dreams
Lords of Thunder
Armed Police Batrider

I think Guwange and ESP.rade are cool, and I like Mushihimesama 1.5, but I don't really like vertical games, and, if you didn't already notice some of my venom, I really don't care for danmaku that much. I have some choice words for "bullet hell," which is now just a term people use for some reason, and apply to STG now (COTTON REMAKE IS A BULLET HELL????). My desire for new horizontal games even led me to think Soldner X was saving hori when it came out! When I was in high school I played Border Down and Soldner X at the same time and considered them equal! To me now, that's an insane premise, and while I still have some fond feelings about it, Soldner X is not a good shmup at all if compared to every hori that came before it.

< hottake >There should probably be more new R-Type clones and less danmaku games. GG Aleste 3 revived the Compile style, and I'd like to see someone look to revive the classic Tecnosoft style.< /hottake >

I'm being facetious, and this actually doesn't matter that much, but I think most horizontal games made now are either trying to take "bullet hell" concepts to this perspective or are just Thunder Force IV worship. The problem is that the horizontal games that are made now trying to cash in on some sort of nostalgia, rather than trying to make a good horizontal game. It's like those stupid metroidvania and roguelike trends. You can put some detailed sprites on a screen and some out of touch 40 year old will buy it, but that doesn't really scratch my itch. Vertical games are being made by people pushing mechanical boundaries, and horizontal games are being made to fit on a megadrive cart... where are the new Einhanders???

I'm currently trying to 1CC Border Down 6D on a RYYRYR style route (Im currently stuck trying to optimize my score on the stage 5 Boss), and I'm learning Last Resort, but I probably only will do the first loop since that game is insane. My first 1CC, and for a while the only one I really aimed for, was Metal Slug X when I was in middle school. I slammed my name on the high scores of my local arcade and I worked hard for that! When I got really into KOF in high school I stopped playing other types of arcade games as seriously, though I was pretty good at Metal Slug 4 and 5 for a while. These days when I play it's like I forgot how to use the jump button.

A sidenote, but I found on an ancient harddrive a signature I made for an old forum when I first got into Border Down :)

The original creation date reads June 2010, so my date for when I began my obsession with the game wasn't just me guessing a random date in the end.

With that in mind, I do want to bring up a funny story about my time in college related to my 2010s obesession with the game. It was probably around 2014-15 or so, I can't remember exactly, but I brought my dreamcast into the dorm and started playing Stage 1 Green, and one of my dormmates who saw me not just playing a dreamcast, but also a shmup, wanted in. I didn't realize how hard the game was on first play until I saw him just die to the first formation, but that's also where I realized how great the game was, because the surface of it sort of obscures how hard it actually is, because it wants you to learn how to play it, not just come in casually and beat it with experience gleaned from other games. Truly a genius game.