With work commitments out of the way, I’ve begin to devote more time to my ‘portfolio’. I have a few things planned, but top of the list in that I want to make a fun little 8-bit style game – something simple enough for me to wrap my head around, but with enough leeway to still be interesting. Given my limited grasp of programming languages, I decided to use Game Maker because it’s cheap and easy, and within a few days, I had managed to piece together a nice little scrolling shoot-em-up engine. But where do I go from here?

I’ve played quite a lot of scrolling shooters over the years, but when I sit down to think about it, I can’t really describe how they work. I’ve been searching online for some design theory on the subject, but all I’ve found so far is a load of narrow genre definitions that focus on the context instead of the gameplay, and technical design theories about enemy bullet patterns. What I’m looking for is something that cuts through all this and gets down to the bare bones. What do I mean? Things like this:

  • You control an avatar that can move around the screen and fire shots of some description.

  • Your shots usually travel in a straight line, in the same direction as the scrolling screen.

  • Enemies sweep across the screen in periodic waves.

  • Touching enemies damages you; touching your shots damages them.

I think that’s the basics. Obviously there’s an endless list of exceptions and caveats, but I think most of these can be described as follows:

  • You often have two or three different weapons to choose from, with unique qualities and attack patterns.

  • In particular, you usually have some kind of smartbomb attack that does massive damage to everything on the screen, while being very restricted in number.

  • Your different weapons are often interrelated – using weapon A powers up weapon B, for example.

  • Enemies often shoot back! Their shots damage you, but not other enemies.

  • Some enemies linger on the screen until they are destroyed, most notably bosses.

An interesting observation at this point is that the scrolling screen seems to be neither here nor there. The optical illusion of flying over a forest or through an asteroid belt, only really has meaning as an explanation of why enemies keep flying away behind you instead of stopping to make sure you’re dead – you’re zipping along in one direction, and they zoom past in the other. At this stage, when I’m just trying to conceptualise the fundamental gameplay, I don’t really care what the background is doing – what’s more important to me is the effect the scrolling screen has on threat positioning, and stuff like that.

What do I mean? Well, in a non-scrolling shoot-em-up like Contra, enemies will run back and forth on screen and keep shooting at you until you kill them or run away; in a scrolling shooter like Ikaruga, enemies will usually move around in a choreographed formation and then fly away. I say “usually” because this is not always the case – stage 3 of R-Type is one of many instances in which a large battleship cruises along at a similar pace to the scrolling screen and forces the player to destroy each section before they can progress – but the basic principles remain the same. Enemies are on screen; some of them are shooting at you; some are moving more than others.

Around here is where I start having problems. It’s not too hard for me to come up with an interesting set of interrelated weapons, because there are lots of different ways weapons can work – different firing mechanism, different movement patterns, different properties for when they eventually hit enemies – but when it comes to things like enemy behaviour and placement, I can’t really appreciate them as anything other than threats to be eliminated.

I mean, given that the player will be flying along and shooting at targets, what other effects can their shooting have? I’d like to achieve something more than just killing a load of enemies, even if I’m sticking to the same style of gameplay – basically, firing an awkwardly-aimed gun at moving targets while dodging about. It’s not even terribly difficult to think of a non-violent context for this behaviour – imagine if the player is flying along in a gyrocopter, throwing breadcrumbs at passing birds – but you’re still just moving and shooting and moving and shooting. Is that all there is?

I’ve been trying to think of ways to make the game world a bit more explorable and interactive, but this doesn’t seem to gel very well with the scrolling screen. Everything is always rolling on by, and players only have a limited time to interact with things before they disappear off the screen. It reminds me of an old game on the Atari Lynx called Gates of Zendocon. At certain points in each stage, an exit gate would float past – players who stuck the level out for longer would be rewarded with exit gates that skipped a few stages. This is a little more like what I’ve been trying to come up with, but it’s still really simplistic.

Well, the process of writing all these thoughts down has given me a few ideas about what to do with my game, but I’d still like to throw it out as a question. What can be done in a scrolling shoot-em-up besides moving and shooting? Is there mileage in deliberately not shooting – picking out particular targets from a group while leaving the rest? What other activities make sense within a scrolling environment?