SPIT · Magic BLACK demo selections

SPIT · Magic BLACK demo selections Vol 2.

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...

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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.

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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.

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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. In all of the things I do, I know I can improve, but in this thing, taking on the task of doing everything myself, I've become a better artist, composer, and programmer, because I am continually challenging myself. Just as when I first started working on trying to reverse engingeer Buriki One without any ability to play the game back when I was in college, I'm always interested in challenging myself to do something that is probably impossible, if only to do it for the sake of doing it. 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.

If you want to do something, then do it. And finish it.

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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, with a lot of influence from stage design in horizontal "cute em ups" like Cotton and Harmful Park, a subgenre I've always been a big fan of. 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]

[second new comment for demo]While I was tweaking everything, I came up with this identity crisis again. What I enjoy in the games I play is often this sparse suffocation, where patterns are small, but the rate formations arrive can cause them to fill the screen in a way that creates some sort of stress on the player. A lot of classic 90s games, especially horizontal ones, don't have a lot of bullets, but this is counterbalanced by how the bullets work. While I work on the waves, I find myself going back to look at Cave games for some reason, because I have, to some degree, accepted the common perception that Cave games are STG, and that if a game is not danmaku, then it is not good, despite me not playing those types of games, and not really liking them. So, then I go back to play Lords of Thunder, or Thunder Force, or Harmful Park, etc, whatever I feel like booting up while I take a break, and I remind myself that what I like from these games is still STG, and I shouldn't try to use other people's expectations of STG as "bullet hell" to determine what I want to make.[/second 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.

[new comment for demo]A way I can sort of explain this approach is like how your have to play to get SR points in Super Robot Wars, especially in the harder ones. Though the games aren't "hard" in a SRPG sense, especially when compared to some Fire Emblem games, what makes them tricky is that they have a lot working under the hood in terms of optimizing a single turn. When you aim for an SR point, you often need to prioritize a certain stategy, maybe even burn your SP to use spirits to guarantee it, and often one turn decides everything. By allocating resources early, you limit the ability to perform optimally in the second half of the stage, especially with beefier bosses, and poorly allocating them early can sometimes means not being able to actually finish a boss off when they recover whatever 15% or so they get every turn. Playing in the Hard mode of a SRW game in getting a majority of the SR points, will cause you to play differently than someone who is playing at a more casual level and staying on the normal route. In addition, getting +5 PP every SR point gives you resources you can use to maintain your Hard mode run, and the difference in getting an SR point often means effective use of PP, as certain skills or stat boosts can give pilots and units the edge they need. This sort of decision making is also why I really enjoy Border Down, because in many situations, especially when you watch high score JP runs, resources are being exhausted in order to confirm a routing. It's also why I dislike No Bomb as a concept, because while it rewards skill for the player, I think it as a design choice limits possibilities for the designer, those of which could maybe have provided something more interesting for the player in the long term.[/new comment for demo]

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, mixed with Strania's O/D and Battle Mania's life system. 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.

[new comment for demo] I have made some changes to how getting hit works. When you suicide, you get an orb that eats bullets, and after a short amount of time, can reposition, but you can't fire, and while the bullets you absorb add up to your score value, they don't add up to your bit count, so you can't suicide in hard sections and redeem what you lose. There's a lot you lose in getting hit, you miss opportunities for laser score, and any units you absorb aren't as valuable for scoring as if you used the basic orb to absorb them. I think what I want to explain in this is that I don't want the difficulty of the game to be like an arcade game, I want to make a more console like game that appears, on the surface, simple, but has mechanics that require more work; after all, Einhander doesn't appear hard at a surface level when compared to a CAVE game. I don't want the 1CC to be hard, I want the way you play for score to be hard: I let there be multiple ways to use your tools, each providing different degrees of score, based on rank and means, so the way you route is key to the final score. I've been trying to fine tune the formations and bullet patterns to be like little obtuse puzzles that force you to decide how you want to use these tools, and what I want is the player to really think about what tool is the most useful in each situation. I am just one man, so I can't predict the future, but I have spent a long time really trying various strategies so I could really fine tune everything to how I like. [/new comment for demo]

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]

As for the characters, I'm a mecha fan, so I'm a manly ship person; however, I'm also a fan of cute em ups, so the character and mechanical design is a mix of both, to some degree. Ultimately, for me, designing the characters was more a concession to the problem that people just want to play games with girls in them now (This began as a Tank Police game after all, my initial sprites where just those tanks, and I intend to make the final isometric caravan a tank game). Mushihimesama is popular for reasons other than the gameplay, and touhou has changed the STG landscape in ways we can't really put into words. Magic's design is a "modern" twist on Cotton (the original sprite before I started modeling was much more "witchy"), and though my sketches are in pencil, her hair isn't bubblegum pink, its maybe more a lighter purple. I also sort of decided to bait with the design, since this sweatshirt/thighhigh stuff is popular with people online and would probably draw attention and free fanart. The mixed sock thing is also "effective" in character design to show someone who doesn't care/is absent minded. The top half of the design is more my own interests, designed after my own personal time in the East Bay: she wears a patch jacket, with the backpatch being the Metal BLACK poster, but maybe due to copyright issues I'll have to fudge the textures in a later build. BLACK is designed after a character from a certain show I like, but I'm not going to implicate myself by saying who :p

What's fun though with human characters is that I can create more interesting ways the models interact with the Force, rather than it just being an orb in front of the ship. All of the characters and bosses make use of Force in different ways, which can also inform how I decide designing bullet patterns overall. Also, having the characters being women allows for me to play into the "dystopian magical" theme with the context of the historical distrust of women as witches practicing magic to undermine society.

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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
Cotton: Fantastic Night Dreams
Lords of Thunder
R-Type
Battle Mania (1&2) Armed Police Batrider

Batrider got kicked because, while I love it, I just don't think I should list it when I never really cleared it. (I cleared R-Type ages ago so it still counts for me, though I'd probably have to relearn it for the 1-ALL if I played today.)

My clears + what I want to clear

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.