Fairy Maid Scrap Attack design doc

Since most of the bullets are spawned by player actions (destroying scrap), the player can choose their own difficulty by being careful with destorying scraps. To not make the dodging trivial, there must be pressure on the player to destroy a lot of scrap at once to create interesting dodging situations. Scrap attack in Blue Revolver have two main "drives" that push the player towards destroying lots of scrap: time pressure to clear a path before the next wave starts (survival) and using the piercing shot to cash in on combo (score).

Since the player is encourage to take on risk for score, it is entirely possible that they'll frequently misjudge and kill themselves. We can soften the consequences of bad decision and make the game less frustrating through a number of means.

• Bombs (or other resources) the player can spend to get out of trouble
• Artificial slowdown when many bullets are on screen
• Cap to the number of bullets that can be spawned (may also be important for scoring system)

For single screen shmups like Centipede, Space Invaders, etc, the goal is not to beat some distant final boss. Since there is no distant goal to motivate the player, the gameplay needs to be engaging already from stage 1. Thus, we want to avoid an aggressively scaling scoring system where the bulk of the score comes from later stages, as it makes early-game gameplay meaningless. If anything, the ideal for single stage arcade games is for the early stages to matter the most, since the difficulty is low enough that the player can truly play to maximize score.

Some players may still be motivated to clear as many stages as possible. It is thus beneficial to tie gaining lives to scoring, since it will encourage more players to engage with the scoring system.

Fairy maid tasked to clean up waste from Patchouli's magical experiments

Why are you forced to clean up waves with strict time limits? Idea: Sakuya knives you if you're too slow.

• Could be made into an explicit mechanic instead of just fluff: you have to end waves 'manually' by moving to the top of the screen or possibly pressing a button to advance to the next wave, and if you're too slow, knives start spawning. Could let more skilled players 'milk' a stage for longer if they are comfortable dodging more knives.

Needed to justify why people should player our game instead of Blue Revolver.

• An obvious advantage we have is that we are not tied to Blue Revolver's scoring system: we can make scoring system that acknowledges the wave-based nature of the game.
• Additional types of scrap.
  • Indestructable scrap that must be navigated around.
  • Books (like EoSD stage 4) that spawn bullets without the player doing anything?
  • Scrap that drops ammo (could have more HP to make them a time investment, or hide them among blocks you don't want to destroy or can't destroy - want a way to make them not trivial to grab.)
• Good art / production values? <- This is hard… ;_;
• Boss waves? A single short spellcard every 5 waves or so for variety? Don't want long bosses as it breaks flow. Should be noticeably shorter than most Touhou spell cards, maybe just a few seconds of dodging. (The boss can just be a recolored EoSD stage 4 book or something.)
• Actual end of content (like a final boss)? Might attract players that are more motivated by seeing an ending. We can still loop the game forever. Softens up the single-screen aspect a bit for perhaps wider appeal.

Need something like:

• 1 infinitely scrolling background.
• 1 shmup player sprite (lightly animated)
• A few different types of scrap. Could be recolored with shaders for even more variety.
• Title screen.
• Game over screen.
• High score screen
• Tutorial screen
• Characters select screen? (Not sure if needed)

Many of these should not need fully original art. The different screens can just use rearranged elements from the title screen for most of the screen space.

Settle on after art style to enhance mood we want to convey. We need like 1 BGM track so it's less time sensitive than the art. SFX can probably be stock from opengameart etc. Could use voice synth like SynthV if we want voiced lines. I have used it in the past and it's easy.

More BGM might be desireable if we want to do funky things like boss waves. Those songs wouldn't need to be long: the main point is to provide contrast with the normal music to indicate that something abnormal is going on.