Inspiration - Part 2

The Notes app on my phone is filled with snapshots of ideas. Some are short and concise, like this idea for a Caillou-inspired game I had written down in June 2021 and forgotten about until finding it just now:

Each Day I Grow Some More
Play as a Caillou-esque little boy. Engage in activities in a small environment to complete a "day", the next day you're a bit bigger. Eventually larger than Earth, larger than the solar system, eating galaxies. Growing up is not so tough... except when I've had enough!

(now I feel inspired to make that as a side project)

Others are long, stream-of-consciousness dumps of whatever comes to mind, trying to figure out the core of a game and all the important elements. For this Caillou game it might be a paragraph about how the little boy would control, what exactly you'd do to "grow up", how long the game would be.

By winter of 2021, I had received my MiSTer FPGA in the mail and had dove in deep on classic games, mostly ones I had never played or played very little. I beat Sonic the Hedgehog 2, one of just a handful of Sega Genesis games I owned as a kid (the pack-in with my console!), for the first time in my life. I also discovered how great the Bonk games are, and that set me off down the rabbit hole of PC Engine/TurboGrafx-16 games. Anyone familiar with that library knows it's stacked with one genre in particular – 2D shooters. 

My own history with 2D shooters/shoot-em-ups/shmups was limited. A friend of mine had Raiden Trad for the Super Nintendo, a top down shooter that seems to be a decent conversion of a good arcade game. I also remember playing R-Type DX on a different friend's Game Boy Color, finding it extremely hard and then deciding I don't like side-scrolling spaceship shooters as a result. I dabbled in things like Darius over the years, but for the most part stuck to top-down games. Select ones. I was drawn to Treasure's Ikaruga because of its polarity mechanic, and honestly probably the fact that it was a Dreamcast game ported to GameCube (being a proud owner of both a Dreamcast and a GameCube). I bought Radiant Silvergun as soon as it hit the Xbox 360, its first official English-language version, mostly motivated by it being developed by Treasure as well. I'd drop a few quarters into top-down shooters in the occasional instance I visited an arcade, games I can't recall the names of but in retrospect some of them were almost certainly developed by Cave.

Having enjoyed my time with Fantasy Zone so much, I decided to give more horizontal scrolling shooters a try. I had a nugget of an idea to do research for, so the research was always in the back of my mind. As I delved into the genre (subgenre?) more and more on MiSTer, here are some games I remember standing out:

Cotton
This broke the "side scrolling" curse for me in a big way. I think swapping out a tiny spaceship for a big sprite of a witch on a broomstick helps, and the levels really feel dynamic and interesting. 

Magical Chase
Continuing the theme of a witch on a broomstick. This one has a shop mechanic! That was practically the holy grail for me during this research. The main character also has a beefy health bar, which is interesting in the genre - usually the norm is dying on a single hit. I sat down and played through most of this game in my first sitting with it, but something kind of bothered me as I got deeper into it. I kept collecting resources to power up my character, and upon dying I could basically just keep using them. It started to feel like this was simply going to be a war of attrition, where eventually I power up my character enough that I just brute force my way through the game. This didn't seem fun to me, so I opted to end my playthrough instead.

R-Type
The original R-Type is probably my #1 touchstone when it comes to pacing, enemy variety and overall gameplay feel and the flow I want the player to feel. For a while I would sit down and play R-Type every day, seeing how far I could get. It was one of my first real attempts to "learn" an arcade shooter, although to this day I have not finished it or even really come close. It's kind of the opposite of Magical Chase in that you don't get to keep anything when you die, so it can be a frustrating experience to be a few levels in and now you're back to basics. The game is fairly good about giving you some power ups at the start of each level, at least. 

Lords of Thunder
This game is infamous for its over the top presentation and CD-enhanced heavy metal soundtrack. Although it retains the usual arcade-style game loop, there is quite a lot of choice from the player - they can choose from several armor sets with different abilities, choose which level to attempt first, and choose how to spend their money after completing a level or dying. Another game with a shop! This shop feels nicely balanced for the game, giving the player a leg up but still requiring some level of mastery of the game mechanics. Something really interesting to me is that even your health needs to be purchased. You're always able to choose if you want to enhance your defense or offence, and you have a few ways to do both. 

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Development of Chrono Blazer started at the very end of 2021, in my Notes app. I wrote a note called "Shooter thing" and I started with basic mechanics - "Go back in time and collect a resource. Come back to the 'present', upgrade ship. Side view, free movement left and right with vertical scrolling as well." Eventually I started writing about the story: "All part of some pivotal apocalyptic moment. Player controls an amnesiac pilot slowly piecing things together..."

I recall having this vision in my head of something quite close to Fantasy Zone, with free scrolling in an infinite loop and a boss at the end. However, thinking about actually working on this isn't that exciting to me. Fantasy Zone already exists. The recent remasters of the games add some of the mechanics I had in mind already and, as much as I was inspired by them, they're not even close to something I'd consider among my favourite games of all time. Those spots are held by games like Zelda and Metroid. 

There's also the consideration of skillset. Creating levels manually is time consuming. The iterative process can be grueling. In many ways, it's simpler to just have open space with enemies that spawn in. They can even be procedurally spawned. But I don't know how to do that. I do know how to make levels, and have done it as my full time job for years. I know it can be grueling, but I also know I'm equipped to take that on.

So I decided the game needed designed spaces with walls, obstacles, cool hand-crafted moments. The idea being that a single run through feels like an arcade shooter, like R-Type or Cotton, but that you would retry after upgrading your ship. Next time, you'll be stronger and better at the game, and potentially unlock new paths with your upgrades. Which is where the inspiration from games like Metroid comes in. It seemed obvious to me that the game should take place in one large world, gradually uncovered by making expeditions in new directions.

By this point, my one hour of free time at the end of each day had come to an end. I was more likely to go to bed with my son around 9 PM, pass out on his floor, and wake up at 2 AM with a sore back. Sometimes I'd go back to sleep, sometimes I couldn't. During a lot of these sleep-deprived nights, I'd just lay awake thinking about this "shooter thing". I didn't always write things down, as there are some pretty key ideas that aren't present in any of my notes from that time.

One of these ideas was the concept of a giant explosion that's perpetually on your tail. Whether or not I should try to cater to a hardcore shmup audience, I do find it insightful to hear their perspective on why they like the games and what they consider to be the essential hallmarks of the genre. Watching a video by YouTuber The Electric Underground planted the seed in me that there needs to be something compelling you forward, something he considers essential in a shmup. If you put the controller down, the game doesn't stop. Things are going to play out without you.  A giant, slowly growing explosion does the trick. Particularly when paired with a ship that can never fully stop and will move at a slower "idle" speed when you aren't manually pushing a direction.

However, I wasn't just blindly trying to make sure my game is "shmup" enough (though I do see value in respecting what works about the genre and not straying too far from it). It happens to solve a problem I had  – I want the player to die and retry a lot. What if they just hang out and try to get the most out of a single life? I had already decided against auto scrolling, so the explosion thing slotted in nicely. Something about the idea of it is striking to me too. I thought it would be impactful and dramatic and add a lot of needed tension to the game.

So, I had nailed down some essentials:

• 2D shooter with 8-way movement in all directions.
• Earn currency, buy upgrades after death.
• Large interconnected world with hand-crafted level design.
• Giant explosion trying to kill you.

And during one of those sleep deprived nights, I decided to start making it.