lnc0

Assigned Essex Lad at birth

  • Fae/Faer

Sebastiana
In that 3rd Decade cycle
Autistic as in Eat My Ass
Agender / A System / Cute

Currently writing Beastiary Beas


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Banner announcing this post was written by Muzu the Capybara, who is surrounded by SHMUP-y shapes

SHAPES! You know them, you learn’t about them, you saw them all go in the square hole and maybe, just maybe: You know what a trapezoid is.

I think a lot about how our early industry is defined by shapes. Shapes defined what kind of games were developed, the building blocks of what our entire industry would become. We can blocks! Long block! What does a long block look like? Errr a tube, a stick, a paddle? Yes a paddle! Two paddles? Half a third block, that’s a ball! Tennis! PONG! But but but but you put four smaller blocks near the corner sides? That’s a car! Oh and my god a triangle? That's a plane my friend.


But as graphics and technology evolved, people began to crave more than shapes. You don’t wanna play as the paddles, you want the entire men! Indeed it's hard to drawn comparisons between Pong and Grand Slam Tennis, aside from the fact they are both depicting the same subject matter: Tennis. But for one genre it feels like this core tether from it's inception to it's most modern iteration still share the same core DNA and a part of that DNA is: Shhaaaaapppppeeessss.

SHMUPS (SHoot 'eM UPS) have in some ways to this very day retained this kind of relationship with the geometry of the objects in it's games (can a genre be possessive of nouns? Idk). Throughout its history there have been many shapes in the genre, from planes, to bugs, to faces and as of Touhou the shapes can even be women! Diversity Win!!! This may sound abstract so let me try and explain by giving a timeline to one single enemy in Capcom's Debut arcade game: Vulgus which drives me batty every time I think about it.

Astroid screenshot

We have four stops on this train and we have to start to one of the formative SHMUPS: Asteroid. You wanna talk about Shapes? This is a SHAPE. The Triangle, the platonic ideal of a plane. Remove all the bells and whistles and what do you have? Triangle. Just a perfect abstract communication of Shape That Kind Of Looks Like Something. Even said Asteroids are Hexagons But Wrong So You Know God Made Them, which communicates organic big thing in space, hey I know an organic big thing in shape: Fuckin' Rocks. I hope I've communicated the process of how devs can use geometry to imply objects from our world, in the most confusing possible way.

Space Inaders Screenshot

But that brings up to stop number two on this journey: Space Invaders, which actually I think pre-dates Asteroids now I'm thinking about it, but just roll with me here. So we have our shape, but what if we need our shapes to do something which benefits the gameplay loop, but doesn't really have an analogous concept in our world. Well if you're Taito's seminal Space Shooter YOU MAKE UP A SHAPE AND PRAY

There's a lot of SHAPES in Space Invaders that make a lot of sense, you have your PC which resembles a Tank aiming to the sky, so it's behaviour of only moving on one axis feels like it makes some degree of sense: Tanks can't get on their little leggies and jump, sorry if you're just learning this for the first time. There's also UFO's which also just fly around in the sky, again that's something ingrained the public consciousness, I can comprehend that. But what about the things slowly coming down from left to right? What does that? In a sense you have to make a shape which tries to draw from so many differing experiences from the average person and hope they come together to convey this abstract idea. The path they went is interesting, they played on the fact while these things are huge in the game universe, they are very smoll in reality, i.e YOU looking at them. So what's small and is bad when it's slowly coming towards you? I mean bugs, like little ants coming towards you in your garden, or just being on your kitchen top at all, that sucks. Little fish or like a jellyfish corpse on the beach? Like yeah if you're in the water you wanna avoid that right? But you can't really shoot those things with a Tank, but you can shoot aliens. This all comes together with a SHAPE of said Space Indavers which really try to invoke both danger in universe and "Little thing touching you, eeeeeeewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww" for the real life player behind the controls.

Galaga Screenshot

But maybe that's waaaaaay to abstract and you think you can do better, says you who are Namco in this example who are actively going to iterate on Space Invaders anyways despite this opinion. Maybe god up above has already blessed his lambs with a SHAPE who can contextualise this behaviour, as in the enemy flight patterns to throw off the player? This brings us to stop number 3 with Namco's Galaga. This game the little dudes you're shooting are BEES, or rather lean completely into insectoid designs, specifically ones with wings.

The fly buzzing around your face that is just a little annoying enough to set off your irritation is such a universal experience, I feel this better communicates and contextualises the enemy behaviour even better then Space Invaders did! But having Space Invaders existing as an additional contextual point cannot hurt either! The imagery is still abstract however, these are bugs which are somehow the same size as an entire spaceship that you're controlling. But it still is somewhat in the realm of believability, Flies are small, little toy planes are small and that's enough real world experiences to draw on to accept Galaga's reality.

Now the reason all the above is currently working to use abstract visuals to contextualise gameplay is the graphical capabilities of the technology of when they were made. Galaga is the most graphically advanced at a whole 8-bits, more then two colours, but also that's still enough for communication to outweigh building a world or making a non-abstract premise to your game.

Vulgus Screenshot

But not so for our next game Vulgus, which does have athe grahpical capabilties to communicate it's gameplay in non-abstract means. It can be a game about a space ship shooting other spaceships! But Capcom does not choose to do this! Instead they elect to contextualise the pantheon to who's shoulders they stand on with their advance graphics. The move here is insane, while Vulgus has normal enemies, they also have mid-bosses which are bigger enemies with more health, which they depict incests, the jelly fish and asteroid shapes, as giant shapeships themselves that just Look Like That.

Now why did they do this? I cannot guess, perhaps they thought they needed The Shapes to show potential players that Vulgus is just like them other Invaders games you like! This was Capcom's first game after all and maybe they didn't wanted to play it safe. But maybe they just knew, this entire genre is the last bastion of Shapes. As graphics got better in the 16-bit era the abstract was no longer needed, developers can now depict their worlds without the need to worry about readability. The Shape is dead, long live The Thing. But for SHUMPs there's still a place for the Shape, not for practicalities sake but Shape for the sake of Shape!

With SHUMPs simple premise set in stone: Shoot whatever isn't actively you, due to many iconic titles entering public consciousness. The Shape is truly set free! Your Shapes can be spinning square, screen filling horrific aliens or in the case of the Touhou series the Shape can even be a Woman, diversity win! I can't remember if I made joke already and I'm not going to scroll up and check so sorry if this is your second time reading that, unless it wasn't.

Anyways, all this is to say this is what I love and appreciate about SHMUPs, by really staying in the same place since the 80's, they can really occupy this bizarre space where visuals do not have to contextualises gameplay, in fact most bullet hells will have a small dot representing your hitbox, overlaying your Playable Character. Nothing matters, anything on the screen can be whatever shape it wants, the genre is free in ways no other is. What Shapes will SHUMP devs expose us too next? The sky is the limits, because you probably can't use a background as a foreground sprite, I say this but some dev will try, it will be glorious.

Footer of more SHMUP-y shapes


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