Game Development Tastes & Shared Shmup Soup Musings

Someone recently told me that some of these little shmup thoughts and observations are “writing history.”

Which is very kind.

Also, I chuckled a bit as the lens of my experience shifts in perspective with a lifelong love of arcade and retro gaming.

I don’t know if I’m writing history. That feels like a lot to put on the shoulders of a guy noticing weird little arcade game things on the internet.

Most of the time it feels more like I’m just poking at tiny feelings I’ve collected from games, players, devs, score chasers, Discord creatures, and the occasional ancient arcade ghost. Then I say one of those things out loud and someone goes:

“Oh. Yeah. That’s it.”

And that moment rules.

Because suddenly the little private pile of experience in your head connects with people in this specific moment of time. It turns out the thing you thought was just taste, or instinct, or “I dunno, this feels right,” can become language.

A tiny playbook.
- A wisdom nugget.
-- A little piece of human taste someone else can steal, remix, argue with, or carry into their own work.

That sounds basic. Maybe it is basic.

But I still enjoy marveling at it.

Taste Is Cooked Experience

The games we love are not just references.

They become ingredients. Lessons deeply embodied in reflexes built upon a legacy of what you've fed into your nervous system...

This is the part I keep circling around. The games you’ve played, lived in, obsessed over, bounced off of, returned to, misunderstood, over-understood, and emotionally imprinted on all become part of the flavor of your taste.

Taste is not just “I like this” and “I don’t like that.”

Taste is cooked experience.

It is Cave games, caravan timers, old arcade rituals, score tables, player shots, medal chains, crunchy explosions, weird collection noises, boss telegraphs, and that one sound effect your brain apparently filed away in 1997 and never deleted.

It is also the rooms you were in.
The people around you.
The forum posts.
The bad takes.
The great takes.
The friend who noticed something before you did.
The dev who accidentally taught you something by solving a problem sideways.

All of that goes in the pot.

Then later you find yourself saying something like, “Enemies should feel satisfying to pop, that's why they call them popcorn enemies” and it sounds almost stupidly simple. But there is a whole lifetime of played experience sitting underneath that sentence.

A player bullet impact sound is not just a sound. It's a signal that you're achieving your goal of shots on point.

It confirms hits when your eyes are busy surviving somewhere else on the screen. That matters even more in wider-screen shmups, where the player might not be able to afford looking ahead all the time.

A medal pickup sound is not just a cute reward noise.

It teaches your brain that sweeping through the aftermath of destruction feels good. It turns collection into rhythm. It turns “get the thing” into a tiny casino-brain joy loop. Arpeggios tickle your rhythms for flow state gaming.

A soundtrack is not just music under the action.

In a good shmup, the music is often the spine of the experience. The shots, explosions, warnings, pickups, and boss attacks should not just sit on top of it like a junk drawer of noises. They can become part of the rhythm of the game itself.

This stuff is craft.

But it is also taste.

And taste is often what lets you feel the craft before you have clean words for it.

The Little Playbooks We Carry

One of the beautiful things about niche game communities is that so much of the knowledge lives inside people.

Not always in tidy design books.
Not always in official talks.
Not always in a clean “here are the five principles of arcade design” format.

Sometimes it is just someone saying, “That felt good.”
Or, “That was readable.”
Or, “I wanted to collect all of that trash immediately.”
Or, “That boss attack needs a better sound.”
Or, “This mode would be more fun if people could compete around it in short bursts.”

These are tiny playbooks.

They are not sacred laws. Please do not make them sacred laws. That way lies forum crimes.

They are field notes from people who have spent way too much time caring.

Make the hit confirm readable.

Let the soundtrack breathe.

Enemies should feel good to pop.

Player bullets shouldn't fall behind you when moving forward, unless you have a real design reason for it to feel odd and less immediate

If gold coins, stars, medals, cash, gems, or some other ridiculous shiny nonsense explodes out of every enemy, your brain should want to vacuum it up.

Caravan modes are not just score modes. They create social energy.

Arcade culture is not only difficulty. It is ritual, performance, memory, pressure, friendship, and sometimes one person absolutely losing their mind over a tiny score improvement.

Sometimes what looks like “juice” is actually communication.

That last one is a big one.

A lot of things people talk about as game feel are not just decoration. They are little signals that help the player understand the world. They tell your hands and eyes and brain what just happened, what mattered, what to do again, and what to be afraid of next. It's ancient: run away from mean and red-looking things. It's the Sith Lightsaber signaling a design language...

That is why I like naming these things.

Not because naming them makes me the grand historian of pew pew spaceship nonsense.

More because once the thing has a name, or even a weird little half-name, someone else can use it.

Creative and Community Soup

This is where my brain lands on “creative and community soup.”

Yes, it is a goofy phrase.

No, I do not think I want to sand it down into something more respectable.

Creative and community soup is the whole messy loop.

The games you played become ingredients in your taste.

Your taste flavors the things you make.

The people you work with bring their own ingredients too. Their instincts, jokes, constraints, strengths, wounds, habits, obsessions, pet mechanics, favorite explosions, least favorite UI problems, and strange little human preferences.

Then the community responds.

• They enjoy the thing.
  • They hate the thing.
    • They question the thing.
      • They misunderstand the thing.
        • They celebrate the thing.
          • They tell you what hit.
            • They tell you what missed.
              • They bring their own memories to it.
                

And that goes back into the pot too.

The people eating the meal influence the next meal.

That is community soup.

It is not only “my creative vision,” which always sounds a little too lonely and dramatic anyway. It is the games I loved, the people I learned from, the people I make things with, and the people who gather around the work once it exists.

A shared meal, basically.

Someone brings the spice.
Someone brings the heat.
Someone notices the texture is wrong.
Someone remembers a flavor from twenty years ago.
Someone says, “Wait, what if this was faster, louder, clearer, stranger, more arcade, more us?”

And then the soup changes.

Maybe that sounds silly.

Good. I like silly when it is carrying something true.

Human Taste Still Matters

I keep coming back to human taste because it feels important right now.

We are in a moment where tools can generate more and more stuff. Words, images, code, systems, ideas, whatever. Endless smooth stuff.

And look, useful. Very useful. I am not throwing rocks from outside the machine here.

But communities are not built out of smoothness.

They are built out of attention.

They are built out of people noticing tiny differences and caring too much about them. People remembering why a certain sound matters. People knowing that a score mode is not just a mode if it creates a reason for friends to gather. People sensing that a pickup noise is not “just audio,” it is little goblin brain candy that teaches the player to chase the shower of shiny nonsense.

Human taste is messy, but it is not random.

It is memory with opinions.

It is experience with seasoning.

It is a nervous system that has played too many arcade games and somehow turned that damage into design instinct.

That kind of taste is hard to fake because it is not only about knowing facts.

It is about being flavored by the thing for long enough that your reactions start to carry history, memory, preference, and community residue.

Yay, residue.

Saying the Thing Out Loud

Maybe this is the part I like most.

Saying the thing out loud.

Taking something that was floating around as instinct and giving it enough shape that someone else can grab it.

Not perfectly.
Not permanently.
Not as the final word.

Just enough.

Enough for another player or dev to go, “Oh, I know what you mean.”

Enough for someone to test it in their own work.

Enough for someone to argue with it, improve it, mutate it, or toss it into their own creative and community soup.

That is the meaningful bit to me.

Not “writing history” in some grand way.

More like helping a small community notice itself while it is alive.

Helping turn play into language.
Helping turn language into craft.
Helping turn craft into shared culture.
Helping turn shared culture back into play.

That loop is beautiful.

It is also ridiculous.

Which is probably why “creative and community soup” still feels right to me.

The whole thing is messy, nourishing, collaborative, weirdly flavorful, and better when good people keep bringing something to the pot.

Thanks to the wonderful community of folks, known and unknown, who have helped us stand on the shoulders of the game industry, along with the myriad creative talents and experimenters who came before it.

A little podcast I did this last week with Zirolux that I was thinking about that prompted this word soup: https://youtu.be/M-ipIx-GYas