Y’know, there was something nagging me… and this is it! i meant to produce a quick postmortem for every completed Illogistix product but didn’t get around to it with Quantizer. So here it is, just a quick couple of paragraphs of what passes for thought.
What went right?
Since the objective with Quantizer was to write a simple, fun shoot ‘em up with an online scoring system to see how busy these things can get, generally speaking the entire project went pretty much as i’d planned; it could probably have been more popular (at the time of writing, the online scores appear to have “stalled” at 198 plays) but for the short term at least a few players have enjoyed it and some of the scores Fossil has dragged out of the thing have been rather impressive.
What went wrong?
Nothing actually went wrong as such, although the overall design could probably have been something deeper or at the least allow for more variety. A few people at the Shmups.com forums complained that the scoring was “broken” although it was a deliberate design choice on my part, mainly because it amused me to think of people trying to avoid actually killing about a third of the nasties in order to milk them for score!
What was learnt along the way?
Well, along with some odds and sods of online score programming (or more accurately, honing what already existed in a very rough form until it worked correctly), i did learn quite a bit of useful information about shoot ‘em ups from Fossil, in particular about drawing order of objects and so forth. There’s also the issue of the multiplier and scoring system, that needs a lot more future investigation i think…
Final thoughts
All told i’m still rather pleased with Quantizer, it might be a very simple project but the result worked out pretty well all things considered.
“…it amused me to think of people trying to avoid actually killing about a third of the nasties in order to milk them for score!”
Yep, I found the try not to kill the bigger (and nastier) baddies mechanic very compelling. For a while there I was seriously hooked – as in ‘seeing images of little rotating square bullets when I closed my eyes’ kind of hooked.
Obviously with modern shmups there are all sorts of complexities involving scoring and multipliers, including avoiding the shooting of certain enemies at certain times, but there was something about the elegant simplicity of Quantizer’s multiplier that really made the game for me. It was like risk/reward in concentrated form – abundant in its rewards, but brutally unforgiving of mistakes (having the smart bomb reset the multiplier was a particularly evil yet cool touch!)
As a matter of fact, I’ve been meaning to come back to when I get a moment so I can get hooked all over again.
As far as that shmups.com poster’s comment that the scoring system is ‘broken’ goes… it’s one thing to say you can just kill the small enemies to build up a huge chain, but it’s another thing to actually do while inundated with bullets and baddies. And anyway, that’s where the fun is. Of course, it’s also where the pain is when you accidentally kill a big’un and blow your huge multiplier right before the end of a level! (Pain in a kind of good way, though.)