The implication is, for 8-directionals, indirect-fire weapons like shotguns and seeking weapons are much more powerful. Movement is much less important, since you can shoot at any target from any position. Twin-stick shooters: here you can aim in any direction, not just 8. Let’s compare with its sibling sub-genres: Great games in this sub-genre understand this, and design accordingly: map design, to weapons, to enemy AI. It is this close relation between moving and shooting, and limitations in both, that creates very dynamic gameplay. You can freely move to dodge incoming fire, but doing so will affect your line of fire.Make tactical decisions whether to stay back and shoot in one direction, or charge in and shoot in many directions.The 8 directions means some, but not complete, freedom in engaging enemies around you. I think overhead 8-directional shoot-em-ups strikes a sweet balance between movement and shooting, between tactical play and arcade action. Small differences in game mechanics can mean big changes in gameplay. Fans of those sub-genres will understand how different they are each has different design lessons to learn.
Crimsonland shotgun series#
Sounds awfully specific, so people simply describe these games as top-down shooters or 2D shooters, which lumps them together with other sub-genres like twin-stick shooters ( Geometry Wars), scrolling shooters ( Gradius, most of the Touhou games), run-and-guns ( Contra), even games like Asteroids (which have tank-controls, and includes the Strike series or even the on-foot sections of 2D GTA). In a nutshell, it’s where you can move and shoot in 8 directions, from an overhead perspective. This mouthful of a sub-genre doesn’t get mentioned a lot. Bertram25 (of Valyria Tear and OpenDungeons) encouraged me to elaborate on some of my conclusions in a blog post, so here it is ! What are Overhead 8-Directional Shoot-em-ups? A while ago I started looking for similar games, looking for cool features I can steal, but also for where they weren’t fun, and why.
One game I’m making is C-Dogs SDL, an overhead 8-directional shoot-em-up.
0 kommentar(er)
