Risk, Rank, and the Shmup Comeback Curve

With no risk there is no meaningful reward. When you die and try to retrieve your body/XP, the risk is dynamic to your greed. If you were carrying 3 levels’ worth of XP, that is a very different kind of tension compared to having almost no XP.

I’m also a monster. If games don’t have challenge and a reason for me to grow my skills with the game, then I get bored. I don’t give two shits about walking simulators and “experience” games. What can I say? Skilling up and beating arcade games is a challenge I rise to, and I love the effort of earned fun. :)

This doesn’t mean 1000% out-of-the-gate face punching or asshole Mario levels, though. It’s a curve and a design challenge. Players find and engage with your work at all different levels. The trick is to figure out where that level is and build up their skill expression from there.

The Shmup Comeback Curve

Translating that into a shmup is harder, though.

Losing power-ups on death creates stakes, but unlike Souls, the player doesn’t necessarily get an interesting recovery decision. It may simply make the next attempt harder.

Autoscrollers have an immediacy to them. You have to keep up with the dance, and figuring out the comeback curves for that dance is actually one of the harder aspects of designing in this space.

When the player dies, how much power do you take away? How quickly can they rebuild? Can they still survive the next section with what they have? Does the game give them a path back into the dance, or does one mistake quietly turn the rest of the run into a slow-motion execution?

When Rank Starts Fighting the Fantasy

You can also balance some of that comeback curve through a rank system and do things like adjust enemy amounts, bullets, bullet speeds, advanced attack patterns, revenge bullets, etc.

I find all of that fascinating until the systems become unhinged.

I also personally find managing your rank less enjoyable in shmups because it removes some of the magic. There’s now a cost to hitting that ultimate power-fantasy threshold of being a badass in the world.

The player finally reaches maximum power, fills the screen with absurd amounts of destruction, and feels like they have become the thing the game promised they could become.

Then the game quietly says, “Excellent. We will now punish you for that.”

Rank can protect the comeback curve, but it can also turn power into a liability. Instead of fully enjoying the fantasy, the player starts deliberately avoiding items, suiciding at specific points, or manipulating systems to keep the game from noticing how well they are doing.

That can be an incredible high-level scoring system for the right crowd. It can also become a strange tax on fun.

The Mirrored Version

On the complete devil’s advocate side, maybe there is also something interesting in designing for the people who love walking simulators and low-stakes dopamine-button-awarding games.

You could build a shmup with no player death at all.

Give the player 10,000 hit points and measure their skill by how many they have left at the end.

Maybe that becomes the training-wheels version of reaching a wider audience. Everyone gets to finish the ride, but the health bar quietly becomes a measure of mastery.

A newer player arrives at the end barely hanging on with 200 hit points. A stronger player finishes with 7,000. A lunatic finishes with 9,900 and becomes deeply irritated about the single bullet they clipped during Stage 4.

The experienced player understands that the health bar is secretly the score.

Start players with their kiddie-pool floaties, surrounded by a sea of aquatic bad dudes that don’t do much other than slosh around in the fun. They still get the power fantasy, the explosions, the bosses, and the full journey.

Then, should they become curious, the same system gives them a path toward playing better.

You haven’t necessarily removed failure. You’ve moved it from:

“You are no longer allowed to continue.”

To:

“How well did you survive the ride?”

Maybe death isn’t the only way to create meaningful stakes. Maybe the mirrored version is allowing everyone to reach the end while letting the amount of themselves they have left tell the real story.

The One-and-Done Problem

The other pivot, though, is the quarter-feeding crowd.

For some players, once the credits roll, the game is one and done.

If there wasn’t a major challenge along the way, whether that means failing an entire run, unlocking credits over time, learning routes, or whatever the structure may be, then you’re not necessarily building an on-ramp for players to earn the fun through the skill check.

You may have made it possible for everyone to see the whole game, but seeing the whole game and learning to play the game are two different things.

If the player can float through once with 10,000 hit points, watch the credits, and feel finished, then the kiddie-pool floaties got them across the water but didn’t necessarily teach them how to swim.

For the quarter-feeding crowd, the failed run is part of the relationship with the game. You come back. You learn. You get a little farther. The thing that killed you yesterday becomes the thing you casually dismantle next week.

The credits are not merely content you eventually reach. They are proof that you became capable of reaching them.

Completion Should Be the Beginning

Maybe the trick is that the first clear says:

“You can finish this.”

While the systems around it say:

“Now let’s see how well you can play it.”

Remaining health, grades, unlocks, additional modes, limited credits, alternate routes, scoring systems, harder loops, revenge bullets, whatever.

Something has to turn completion into the beginning of the skill journey rather than the end of the experience.

Access can get players through the door. Challenge gives them a staircase.

The hard part is building both without making the wider audience feel punished for arriving, or making the arcade crowd feel like there was never anything meaningful to overcome.