Devil Daggers

Top down shooters/twin stick shooters already kinda fit this genre, the only difference between the base gameplay of say Geometry Wars and Devil Daggers is the 3d aiming you have to do in Devil Daggers.
You get some gameplay advantages with the top-down view since the player has a better positional understanding, so you can throw some complex bullet patterns/enemy positioning. But you simplify the aiming factor, with the most complex thing you could do is enemies that only are vulnerable when you shoot their backs or when are in some kind of state where the can be hit.

First person shooters lose a lot of complexity with enemy positioning and projectile patterns since the player only has knowledge of what he can see, DD tries to solve this by adding sound cues, predictable enemy movement and spawing positions, but the more complexity you add, the more you'll be getting to that point where the game will be too hard or unfair. You do get some gameplay options such as 3d movement and aiming, but I can't really say if they make up for what is lost.

It's also interesting to note that Doom 1 & 2 are just top-down shooters with a first-person point of view since there's little to no 3d aiming thanks to autoaim and no real 3d mouseaim.

Are you some kind of Irish autist who just came back from the dead?

Play with a sourceport and disable autoaim. Most I know do.

sure is cuckchan in here

The point is essentially that getting a new high score is a punishment for good players because it means you're going to have to work harder in the future to beat that high score. It may be particularly egregious for Devil Daggers since there's no way to make the clock go faster and a point-based system might give you more room for creativity, but it's a "problem" shared by most leaderboards, not this game specifically. I'm also surprised that he didn't bring up custom spawnsets when he was talking about the timer and the reticle, since people actually do make those.

The guy who compares Devil Daggers to Tetris has been around way longer than that video, you should slap him on the wrist for responding to low-IQ memes instead.

He was talking about time investment, specifically, not effort. The entire point of a scoring system is that it takes more effort to get higher. That's why it means you're better than people who scored less. The problem is that scoring in DD is based purely on survival time. That means, every time you beat your personal high score, you have to spend that much more time just to beat the new one. You can't optimize anything about a run. You can't get better at the beginning portion so that you get points faster. If you've got a hypothetical high score of an hour, that means, to beat it, you'd have to attempt to reach that hour mark on each run. Eight failed runs to better your score could mean nearly eight hours time spent.

And that is, specifically, a problem with only this game? Timer or not, it's going to take more time to beat a new high score. The time investment necessary to climb the leaderboard is so varied from player to player (which you can clearly see on player profiles, since the number of attempts is listed) that it's hard to pin down to an objective flaw. A skilled player might not be seeing diminishing returns if it takes them ten times fewer attempts to improve their run than you would, and if you browse the leaderboard you'll see what I'm talking about. You might find yourself sandwiched between a person who took 200 attempts to reach that position and another who took 2,000 attempts, that's not a small difference in time investment.

Of course you can, compare any new player to the top leaderboard position and it's obvious that's not true. Gem farming is an obvious rebuttal to your second point, and clearing waves prior to the next set spawn point can buy you a moment's reprieve, which is useful for a run's stamina.

I was recently chasing leaderboard positions on Nex Machina and the first stage is a) no longer challenging, more or less a formality (which is what Matthew brought up) and b) one of the greatest determiners of how high your score is eventually going to be, and it's essentially a four-minute level. That means that if I feel that a run isn't going to go well, I'm not going to realize that until I've already been playing for four minutes, and how is that different than restarting a Devil Daggers run after the 240 second mark? It's not a matter of just waiting out the clock, two runners are going to be in totally different positions at that timestamp, and you could make an informed decision as to whether a run is worth seeing through or if it's better to start over at that point. A full run of Nex Machina can take just shy of an hour, by the way, meaning that if I continue a run through to see if I can beat my past score, I'm not going to see a return on that time investment until an hour later. And this isn't a hypothetical problem like you were talking about, this is true of that game and it's true of a lot of arcade games. In fact, recognizing that a failed high score run of an arcade game is a lost time investment of up to an hour and a lost Devil Dagger run is at best a lost time investment of ten minutes makes it quantifiably less egregious when it comes to wasting your time.

Could that guy be Matt

Don't even know who matt is.

No shit, I'm talking about the original games.

Gem farming makes it easier, yes, but it doesn't shorten the time to getting a high score, which is the entire point I'm making. The only measure the game judges your competency is by time surviving. There's no system that gives you a higher score in shorter time by taking more risk. Beating a five minute score is going to take five minutes, no matter if you gem farm or not. And no one said it's a problem exclusive to DD, but the way DD does scoring exacerbates the problem by a lot.

Literally the first thing I said, pal, and Matthew did specifically say it was a problem with time-based scoring generally.

That aside, just because you're not seeing points on screen doesn't mean you're not doing better. Take a look at Sojk's run linked in the OP, around the six minute mark when the boss spawns in. He's able to get a clean kill on the thing in about thirty seconds because he took the time to grind out the Lv. 4 Daggers and clear all spawners up until that point, and that's not an option that's going to be available to a lot of less-skilled players. Sojk may as well have an honorary high score at that point because he's drastically improved his chances of survival and his likelihood of moving up the leaderboard.

First, that's not a guarantee he'll get a high score. Second, it will still take him the same amount of time to get that high score. This entire argument isn't about whether you're getting better or not. It's about how the game respects the player's time. With the only objective measurement in the game being time spent, the game outright demands that you spend as much time possible playing it. Even if you're extremely skilled at the game, you'll always have to spend as much time in a run beating a score, from someone less skilled than you, as they did on their run. You're never rewarded for skill with being faster. You're only rewarded with being able to spend even more time playing in a run.

It won't, though, it really won't. It does if you're looking at this purely within the context of a single run since it will take 1,075 seconds to beat a score of 1,074 seconds, but it's different if you consider the amount of time between high scores, which considers the sum time of all attempts. If I get a score of 350, and it takes me a hundred more attempts to beat that record, that's a potential lost time investment of at least five hours, assuming a minimum survival time of three minutes per attempt. If I weren't a shitter and had to grind out attempts and instead learned the game quickly, it could take fewer attempts to best myself, which definitively means a lower time investment, meaning it's definitively not the same amount of time.

You don't have to work this hard to make your points, by the way, because the man himself agrees the late-game competition is rife with RNG, which guts my point about grinding out attempts anyway. It still stands assuming we're talking about players in the 200-900 position on the leaderboard, though.

But I'm talking about the intentional design of the game, not about how reality happens to work. Of course it will take more time if you happen to need more attempts than another person. But that applies to all games, regardless of how they're designed. DD is designed to give no leeway to time spent, though. Most games, where high scoring is the main point, include combos or other systems so that the player is rewarded with gaining score faster, if they're good enough. DD says "fuck you, you will always spend the maximum possible time you need to beat a score."

We're talking about lost time investment, what's the difference? Your issue is smaller since it's a matter of seconds, anyway. It's not revelatory to say that a leaderboard where time and position are directly related definitively means that additional attempts accrue even more time.

It doesn't make any difference in Nex Machina if you can reach 500,000 points is a fraction of the time another person might, if you're going for the highest possible score you need to play the game all the way through, which is the maximum possible time. There's no separate leaderboard I'm aware of that rewards someone for reaching equivalent point scores in disparate amounts of time.

I don't see your problem here. Of course you will need to spend the maximum amount of time to beat your own record. Other games usually last for a fixed amount of time unless they grade you on speedkilling, where the crux is to squeeze out the highest score within that limited timespan. Being better within those games translates to higher score, being better within Devil Daggers translates to surviving for a longer period of time since there is no win state in DD to begin with. While DD could have a point-based scoring system, it would not take away from higher scores relying on staying alive longer.

I don't understand the "wasted time" argument, getting good at something means putting a lot of time into it regardless of how you're scored.

Well it's true in a different sense, just not when it comes to the structure of the leaderboards. If you read Sojk here , who's the current world record holder, luck plays a huge factor in the outcome of top runs beyond the 500 second mark. That's a real problem, because it definitively undermines one of the core appeals of the game (of playing an endless shooter) by putting a ceiling on the game's value. You could say it doesn't matter since it's an issue that only affects 100 people, but that makes it even worse, because those 100 people are the ones who've spent the most time playing the game and care about it the most. The conclusion you could take from that, then, is that the more time you spend playing this game and the more you care about it, the less you get out of it, so new and inexperienced players get a great learning experience and top players go fuck themselves.

Is there any r34?

Seconding.

It's really baffling to me, since this issue could have been entirely avoided by having it be score based, instead of time based.
I get they're going for a sort of "brutal simplicity" but high scores work the way they do, for a good reason.

A better solution I can think of to that is to work with loops like in Konami games, where upon finishing one loop you just play through the game again but with increased difficulty, which technically goes on infinitely until the difficulty gets ridiculous to the point where it's obvious that the game wants you to get off the fucking cab. As it stands, after defeating the Leviathan the game reuses the same post-Leviathan waves over and over but randomly arranged in terms of positioning, which is where RNG can come to screw you over.

Instead it could reuse the pre-Leviathan spawnset and then add more modifiers to it depending on the difficulty, like the current loop determining amount of monsters spawned, what monsters are spawned, monster behavior, or the timing between spawns to be made even shorter. Then there's also the shrinking arena to contend with. So here you'd be playing the same thing over and over, but it gets gradually more difficult rather than the difficulty arising from RNG. Though the increase in difficulty would have to be dramatic enough to not be incremental and to not make it easier or more boring than current post-Leviathan waves.

I think the uneasy spawns like Centipedes spawning right in front of Spiders can be fixed by making spawns conditional, so a Centipede cannot spawn from a position where it'd be blocking the line of sight between the player and a Spider. The possible positions would decrease the more chaotic the action gets, but if it's already that bad then you're unlikely to notice the turd on the shit cake.

Some optimization could be added by rewarding the player for killing freshly spawned enemies with more gems (with the exception of basic skulls and perhaps spawners depending on how much more or less spawner farming is profitable), with freshly spawned enemies being more visually distinct. You already want to kill everything fast to prevent everything from spiraling out of control, and this way you could exercise more consistency over your crowd control with the help of more homing daggers, though the gem requirements for hand upgrades and homing dagger attacks would have to be suitably rebalanced. Another not-so-essential feature I'd also like to see is homing daggers having multiple fire modes. A quick RMB tap while not having LMB pressed would release homing daggers around you in a spherical formation killing most enemies around you, acting as a emergency bomb, though it will deplete your gem stock completely and requires a minimum amount to be able to be used. Holding down RMB while not having LMB pressed instead sends out a projectile traveling in a straight line which explodes into the aforementioned sphere of daggers until RMB is released or LMB is pressed, letting you burst it in the air or within a large swarm of enemies at the risk of not firing. Tapping/holding RMB while holding down LMB will send out homing daggers the same way it already works, though made more consistent by targeting the closest targets first. Tapping RMB after or during firing a spreadshot will augment the spreadshot with a much larger spread radius. Just some vague ideas to throw out there to make more use out of homing daggers.

I hope that SORATH will push out a V4 update with the advent of this review, pushing that Theoretically Imperfect/10 to a Theoretically Less Imperfect/10, if they're not too busy with Spire that is.

I liked the aesthetic back then, but I think the gameplay was dull in the end. Felt like one of those "nothing but the basics but perfected" games, but I'm sure those are hit and miss for many people.

Maybe the easiest band-aid for the problem would just be a dedicated modding scene. I know a majority of dedicated Dustforce players play with the Dustmod, so I don't see why there wouldn't be an equivalent for Devil Daggers, especially since custom spawnsets are already a thing. Of course you'd run into the problem of a) fabricating a scoring system for a game which wasn't designed to have one and b) hosting a leaderboard for those scores, and also c) getting a dedicated group of players to play on that leaderboard so that competition is actually interesting.

Wouldn't be too difficult to make up a scoring system, though, really. You could make the dagger level equivalent to a multiplier so you're incentivized to get the highest level daggers as quickly as possible. SQUIDs that stay alive for longer could give more points when killed (based on how many waves they've spawned) and clearing the stage entirely could give a large point bonus so there's a reason to clear a wave as quickly as possible.

Could work, but I don't think it's addressing the seed of frustration. The easier thing to do would be to just remove any randomization for the spawn points for all pre-Leviathan waves, easier than predicting any hypothetically unlucky enemy arrangements and trying to account for that, anyway. It might push the game into the other direction of being overly deterministic, but it would at least alleviate some justified frustration at the RNG. You could reuse the same waves in a loop and bump up the rank of each enemy for each cycle (replacing every SQUID I with a SQUID II, every SPIDER I with a SPIDER II) but it's just pushing up the ceiling, not removing it. You'll eventually run into the same waves of SQUID III's and CENTIPEDE III's over and over again. Everyone might just have to concede that the concept can only be taken so far.

It's totally possible, since Sorath is a fan of Matthew and he's definitely seen the review, but who knows. Seeing how even a few randomized elements can be such a thorn in the side of a great game makes me really, really nervous about Spire.

I think the question is: would this be a better game if score and spawns were tied to your kills instead of fixed to a timer?

What about giving the player the choice? That's two game modes for the price of one!

That would never satisfy the autism of the kinds of devs that make stuff like DD. Everything has to be mechanically perfect and reduced to its most basic components. Two different modes would be a copout.

Would it even be the same game? If spawns were tied to your kills (assuming you mean that killing the last enemy of a wave immediately spawns the next wave) then killing enemies quickly means you're less likely to survive for a long time, which is inverting the whole challenge. That would make lower times better, because the challenge would turn into clearing all the waves as quickly as possible instead of surviving for as long as possible. Throw a score-based leaderboard instead of a time-based leaderboard on top of that and it's not Devil Daggers anymore.

Thanks captain obvious, the actual question is if that game would be better.
Oh and the spawns are not necessarily waves, just smooth progression based on your kills, and they would be infinite with a procedural (algorithmic and non-random) increase in difficulty.

It's entirely possible, I remember he threw on a trip code a few times in 2014/15 when people were talking about his videos

Sorry, I guess I was just distracted by your genius. Your suggestion has all sorts of problems. A procedural increase in difficulty has the potential to punish skilled players (which I already mentioned but I'll reiterate) because it would mean that killing enemies quickly almost certainly shortens the lifespan of your run, since you'll be facing tougher enemies and more of them. On top of punishing the wrong people it's also ripe for abuse. If you want to survive for as long as possible, the dominant strategy in that situation would be to keep enemies alive for as long as possible to forestall the appearance of harder enemies, which would lead to top players bunnyhopping in circles around the arena with clouds of skulls in their wake. Take your suggestions and apply them to the game and suddenly the people who spam Devil Daggers threads with "lol just play Quake mods instead" are totally justified because at that point what's the difference?

I'll save you a post because I know you're about to say "fuck being the same as a Quake mod, that doesn't answer if it makes it BETTER", because you may as well take a poll, it's totally subjective. If I wanted that challenge I could just play a different game, I play Devil Daggers specifically for its unique challenge, and if it was taken away I would care way less about the game.

I've played games - with better visuals than most modern titles - that run on OpenGL 2, yet this apparently can't.

Wow that's a mighty high IQ you got there, you must watch Rick & Morty.
Sadly your humongous intellect didn't save me a post because apparently you're fucking blind and didn't notice I said score would also be tied to your kills, not time.

...

Maybe you should've said no in the first place, dumbass.

It was implied.

I think you're too busy being a pretentious autistic retard to notice you never addressed the combination of those elements without misunderstanding and you just inserted each one separately into the existing DD design to wank on a korean knitting forum over how insightful you are.
But at this point you're too emotionally invested in your retarded argument to stop being the humongous shlong slurping faglord that you are.

How about trying to articulate what you mean instead of being a sensitive pussy about it and expecting somebody else to do all the work? There's practically nothing concrete in your idea to respond to. I've already said several times that combining procedural spawns with a score-based leaderboard would make it a totally different game and on that virtue alone it's a bad idea, you're not contributing anything to convince me otherwise.

Your banter is fucking weak, by the way. "you must watch Rick & Morty"? That's a Twitter-tier insult.

not quite like dd but super hot is apparently awesome in vr

Drunken Robot Pornography is like a weird mix of devil daggers and jazzpunk I guess. It's not bad.

Thought it was just the guy who worked on the engine for the game. Isn't DD just a beta test for the engine they're going to implement in game 3?

You fakken what mate that wall of text.
Just take the art style, enemy design, and sound design, then make a game out of it.

Devil Daggers already is a game

There’s something about games from this dev that always leave me unsatisified. They never feel finished in terms of content or quality.

If you did you would have already seen that that comment was already posted in this thread , though said player complained about the encroaching influence of RNG the farther in you get, not that it takes longer and longer to reach the highscore

Top-tier runs becoming longer and longer is an inevitability for any game about surviving for as long as possible. A point-based scoring system would allow you to optimize early parts of the run, but eventually everyone will find the most optimal route and the meta would shift to surviving for as long as possible for the most scoring opportunities, because the game doesn't end until you die.

You came to this thread just to say that?