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Rhythm Destruction is a new game from Curious Panda which plays like a traditional shmup, where you control your ship as you traverse through a stage, dodging enemy movement paths, bullets, and environmental hazards. The twist however, is that enemies and objects are destroyed with timed key presses to the beat of the music.
If you’re a programmer developing a shmup it can be hard to find high-quality graphics for your game at a reasonable price. This forum thread lists many of the websites that offer free or cheap 3D models for use in games.
3D models for your shmup
If you’re interested in developing a shmup but don’t know where to start then this should help you. Here are 3 threads in the forum providing shmup-templates, which are frameworks with the basic controls and systems in place to quickly create a shmup.
Game Maker Open-Source Shmup Engine. And Warbird – a barebones game developed with this engine.
Simply choose the engine you want to work with, download the template and start making your shmup! Please post any questions in the forum. The Unity 3D framework is currently in-design and feedback is requested.
Retro/Grade is a new downloadable game for Playstation 3 which looks like a shoot-em-up, but actually isn’t. It’s a rhythm/action game in the style of Guitar Hero which uses the visual motif of a shmup playing in reverse to create the notes. Bullets originate in exploded enemies, and then fly back in time towards your ship – you have to position your ship at the right location and press ‘fire’ just as they touch.
It contains some interesting ideas which I think could work very well in a normal shmup – such as boss bullet-patterns that originate off screen and then converge on the boss. This means that the gaps in the bullet curtains shrink as they approach the player, rather than widening as they do in a normal shmup. It also features a “Prince of Persia, Sands of Time”-style rewind feature allowing you to undo your mistakes.
The game is a little short, you can easily complete it in under an hour, but the music is superb (imagine a mixture of Eurythmics and Daft Punk). Worth a look if you want inspiration for your next shmup. It can be played with either the regular PS3 Dulashock controller or a Guitar controller.
Spline movement is very important for shmups, whether it’s moving your camera through the scene, or making enemies follow precise paths. iTween is a plugin for Unity that makes spline editing and scripting easier.
iTween for Unity
Visit the iTween website for more information.
Discussion about camera scrolling techniques in the forum.
Final Boss is a vertical 2D shmup made with Game Maker by ebbo and eebrozgi, two ‘crazy shmup-fans from Finland’. These guys clearly know their stuff. The game looks, sounds and plays great, and it pays homage to many classics of the genre.
Discuss Final Boss in the forums here.
Continue reading for more videos and screenshots. Continue Reading
3-Step Studio is a new game development tool from GarageGames, the makers of the Torque engine. It is a visual-editor based development tool with little or no programming required to make games. At the moment it is in alpha and only supports Tower Defence and Blackjack style games, however it’s very likely that a shmup template will be added in the future as GarageGames have a history of using shmups in their Torque2D tutorials.
It’s still in a private testing phase, but once it’s release it will be free and will build games for Windows, MacOS and iOS platforms. Find out more at the website – 3stepstudio.com
Toybox looks like an interesting twist on the standard shmup. It’s a shooter on the left of the screen, and a block-matching puzzle on the right of the screen, both of which you play simultaneously.
Toybox – coming soon on iOS.
Read on for the Youtube video and website.
Phi6 has posted a preview of his new shmup entitled Space Tàu…
Space Tàu is inspired by Guxt and will feature random enemy spawns. It’s being developed for iOS.
