Shmup devs' & publishers' consistent ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in terms of actually marketing their games got me shook

Run n gun + GnG-like review saga continues with JJ Squawkers www.patreon.com/posts/run-n-...

iykyk

I think usage of "intuitive" in game design discussions would be a lot more productive if people separated it into 2 categories - intuitive in accordance to real world experiences and intuitive from past exposure to similar games & existing conventions

Unironically tho gamers gotta take some of that energy about artists compromising on sexuality and direct it towards criticizing mechanical compromises & homogeneity. Right now you have massive herds of gamers calling for artistic compromises by demanding devs to remove tank controls and so on

People anthropomorphize video game enemies in a way that creates really fucked up discussions and critical eval. Where if enemies are good at pantomiming "aggressive gameplay" their design is treated as good even if it's completely unfit for the types of player mechanics the game they're in has

Toaster friendly indie arcade game devs looking at the horrendous computer part prices

Let's start a campaign to add the tag "Arcade Puzzle" to games like Tetris, Lumines, Puyo Puyo, Petal Crash, etc on Steam. These games get lumped in with great but completely different genres of puzzle games like Portal and sadly sidelined. Steam users have the power to carve out this niche!

Action puzzle games are the most handheld genre ever cuz playing them on a smaller screen legit helps you keep track of the whole board better IME

Now this is scoring feedback

Happy and creatively fulfilling 2026 everyone!

"The core problem of the beat-'em-up genre in 2025 is content. ... You were expected to replay them over and over, mastering their nuances over time. In the modern era, that can feel like a half-formed hook. Mastery is fun, but we expect more structure—progression and variation."

Wow a 1994 run n gun with advanced evolved modern gameplay mechanics

I love how the whole run n gun "stepping" strat of slowly advancing the screen & clearing out enemies one by one, which is portrayed as a big issue, is either massively de-emphasized if not outright non existent in arcade RnG's. Consoles are such fuckin dogshit I swear

Serious critics have long abandoned vague, unclear, hollow terms like "fun" when talking about games and have adopted the much more robust, sophisticated & descriptively useful "interesting" or "engaging"

Uh oh, Im starting to really develop a taste for brutalist mechanical design. Gotta play more buffer heavy assistslop before my preferences change for good

early test #sandwichdev

Watching my friend play SAGA while half paying attention and the combat sequences just started looking like those insane chinese tiktok videos

You know, the more I think about this, the more this annoys me. Not the people's responses but the fact that dynamic difficulty is seen as an uncreative category. It's PURELY inertia and self fulfilling prophecy - devs treat it like a "flow machine" and players simply learn to view it that way

I'm not allowed to say this just yet but I will anyway - when using 3D, making beat 'em ups is easier than making shmups. Nobody should feel intimiated by the workload if they can handle a shmup. I imagine there's artstyles that make pure hand drawn 2D easy too, Rakugaki Showtime style or something

Frustrated by the fact that nobody's making Elevator Action/Rolling Bird style games I spent the past week+ making a tiny game like this myself, the main bulk of it is done just gotta do some finishing touches & release

Merry xmas everyone!

Think the most accurate & most descriptive way to talk about the difficulty design of most arcade devs/games is that,cuz of the financial model, they tried to err on the side of difficulty & balance.Which,when combined with brutal deadlines and other issues,lead to a lot of what ppl call "unfair"

The medium where mtx,gacha,live service,survivorlikes have become normalized and accepted. The medium where scale is worshipped like nothing else. The medium where important history is lost and tech upgrades are treated as artistic upgrades. The fans of this medium is for sure going to resist genAI

Out of any artists, I think game devs resent being underground more than anyone - even devs of underground genres still see themselves as diet-mainstream, waiting for their big break. Contrasting shmups, which have a more proper underground culture, to beat em ups which have none is night & day

Listen genAI sucks and all but I also must consume a new & shiny product or else the FOMO demons will get me :( hope you understand!

God Mercs is fucking sick, I just wanna keep playing it way past getting the 1cc but there's not a whole lot to do besides cleaning up my route to use less bombs. An ocean of Contra clones and nobody bothered making a successor to a vastly better game 🥲

Wanted to do a quick Mercs review but the thing ended up becoming fuckin HUGE very quickly. Turns out it's a very interesting game, and I feel like more people would recognize it if it got the GnG Resurrection treatment www.patreon.com/posts/run-n-...

Think the most clear demo of why you need principles for game design eval is playing frustrating games. It's a powerful emotion but it's also not only extremely subjective & fleeting (git gud etc) but highly dependent on what surrounds it. Distinguishing good vs bad frustration via introspection is-

Mercs hardest dips fucking owns. This run n gun research project will take forever cuz a lot of the games are so fun I end up just learning the 1cc instead of moving on 🥹

For whatever reason it feels like arcade run n guns are unknown even among people who like console RnG's and like arcade games. Indie RnG devs abso-fucking-lutely have to hop on because the gap between arcade & console/PC RnG design philosophy is HUGE.Most follow in the footsteps of console shit

Marks new NG2 vid is a perfect example of what I mean since he focuses on using terrain youtu.be/7frML8CZLpY?... Modern CAG devs and players think that this terrain stuff is bad & gets in the way of combat, so they turn everything into an arena or encourage YOU to do it by never using terrain

Reviewing rly simple games is a really nice litmus test cuz they force u to ditch the usual crutches of describing parts of the game without ever connecting it all together to get anything worthwhile out of it. U basically have to directly think about how everything connects & ur own play experience

Dark Ages winning best accessibility but losing best action would be really funny

My biggest takeaway from binging arcade run n guns so far is that shot range limits are extremely healthy for this style of games and it's sad that they mostly went away outside of specific weapons. There aren't many RnG games that benefit from your shots traveling through the whole screen

www.patreon.com/posts/145478... Wrote a review of Midnight Wanderers, game's good but I mostly focused on highlighting what it does WORSE than GnG to really home in on what makes this style of games work

Imagine putting archaic crap like continues & slowly escalating difficulty meant to ease players into the harder stages into modern arcade style games...yikes!

Here's a tiny thing that I think is important.Ur blade spin has no recovery frames so you can insta-turn and cover both sides.To counter this,the game introduces red ninjas almost right off the bat and they dont merely outrange you-they specifically stop out of ur range and stand there, theyre aware

Why the hell did IREM put rng bubbles with Psikyo speeds and R-Type hitboxes into a kids' platformer (Play Kid Niki/Kaiketsu Yanchamaru, hell credit feed it cuz that's fun too. Game's a joy beginning to end IMO, wish I played it as a kid)

Every year or two I play Commando to see if I've gotten enough tolerance for finnicky janky mechanics to tolerate its aiming and enjoy the rest of the game, which is awesome. And every year I find out that nope, I have not Thankfully I've got Valtric

Playing more obscure arcade run n guns reminded me that Contra, despite its immense popularity & influence, is one of the less interesting games in the genre. And its console ports stripped a lot of the best aspects of the arcade originals, then 3 buried run n guns completely w the boss rush formula

The lack of readily available documentation on arcade games continues being a massive pain in the ass. Youd think that, with how popular Contra,Metal Slug & Gunstar Heroes are, people would really know their shit about run n guns but nope lol Its basically just Front Line-> Commando-> Contra guys!

store.steampowered.com/app/2879980/... Case in point

Making a non shmup scoring system really puts into perspective how great of a format shmups are for scoring.The autoscrolling creates a really natural feeling time pressure. & since its ranged combat, moving into enemies is disadvantageous so spawning scoring items feels like a good counterincentive

What did they do....

how the hell are this many of you still using spotify. get a bandcamp account like a normal person.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaP-... Gotta be one of the best looking games ever. 0 clue how it plays but look at it & listen to it