Shmup Idea Refinement

I originally wanted to make a shoot ’em up game with a specific theme in mind: breaking out of (rather than in to) Area 51. One or two players would control their own flying saucer as they help aliens escape from the military base, fighting off various types of aircrafts like helicopters and fighter jets. And it would be a very rudimentary shmup with little else interesting going on.

I didn’t like how the game I was envisioning only allowed for one direction of movement: away from Area 51. This may be commonplace for most shmup games, but I wanted the player(s) to have more freedom of movement. So sticking with the aliens/space theme I decides to stage the game in the far reaches of outer space, where there’s plenty of freedom to move around.

Instead of a side scroller, I’ll be making a cooperative game where two spacecrafts are tethered together and must navigate through an asteroid belt. With a top-down view like Asteroids of Binding of Isaac, the players will work together to fight off swarms of enemies and destroy their “bases” (or communication centers or power stations, to be determined). These will drop keys to new areas or extra power ups.

There’s a lot of different ways this game could go…but primarily I want to focus on emphasizing the cooperative challenge of it by assigning different tasks to each ship. One will be in charge of shielding, movement, and dropping bombs, while the other will be in charge of the blaster, missiles, and grabbing puzzle assets (which will inhibit them from using their weapon). For the most part, this will be a fairly simple shoot ’em up with randomly spawning enemies and map elements, though I want to incorporate some puzzle aspects as well with locked doors/portals.

Another advantage I saw in changing the game’s theme to space exploration was in the variety of enemies I could implement. Some types I want to include are slow moving turrets, zooming clusters of aliens, and missile launching minibosses in the form of enemy “bases”. It might be fun to make this into more of a bullet hell type of gameplay, but if I went that route I’d consider adding a dodge (barrel roll) mechanic to make it more survivable.

Naturally getting hit by an enemy/asteroid will deplete health, but I want to add another challenge by limiting the ships fuel capacity. Fuel can be replenished by destroying crystals which are then gathered by the collector ship’s tracking beam. Both ships share fuel and if one is destroyed it will deplete have as quickly until the other ship respawns.

Some formal elements I’ll be incorporating include:

• Cooperative play (and also competitive with a minor point system)
• Resources in the forms of health and power ups
• Obstacles such as aggressive enemies and clusters of asteroids
• Objectives to destroy bases and work with teammate to complete puzzles and maintain enough fuel
• Rules and procedures regarding how power ups function in the game system