Meeting with Radigo

There are so many things you can do in a shmup! Scoring techniques, power ups, scratching, bullet cancelling… The truth is, we can’t support everything, because in this case the interface would be cluttered and too hard to use for beginners and such.
And, to be honest, we don’t know everything!

This is why we are very happy that Radigo, a shmup expert who is contributing to the great french website shmup.com and was directing the Superplay TV show on the gaming TV channel Nolife, agreed to meet me and talk about the SHMUP Creator, what features should, in his opinion, be part of the tool, what is irrelevant, and about shoot’em up design in general.

We meet at the Kawaii café in Paris and talked for 4 hours!
It was really interesting and I took a lot of notes :)
Radigo plays lots of shoot’em ups, is really knowledgeable and articulate, and, better than that, is a game coder himself. The conversation was precise and organized, and I’m really looking forward to starting implement the new gameplay features in the SHMUP Creator.

Actually, I already did: A thing Radigo likes a lot in shmups is secrets: doing things which sometimes spawn something, an item or a secret boss. So I added a “random trigger” to the game. An item can be spawned only sometimes, or some enemies can appears or not depending of the randomization of the conditions.

I really think the result of this discussion will permit people to create more complex and deep gameplay. And as always, the idea is to add some lego bricks of gameplay and to let people use them, and, maybe, be surprised because they will do things I even didn’t thought possible!

Meanwhile, we are hardworking on our demo level, and I’ll keep you posted very soon!

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