ConceptYour home planet has a firm belief in the ways of pacifism. At least, that's how they justified not installing any guns to your so called "battleship" before sending you off to a hostile territory. Apparently this mission is an ancient rite of passage for your people, one that you just heard of minutes before your call to leave.
Instead of using violence yourself, your task is to enlighten your enemies by showing them how their violence only harms themselves. Which might be futile, since what you're facing are merely AIs with no real sentience, morality, or concept of learning things.
Passive Aggressive is no ordinary shmup, in the sense that you will not shoot a single bullet during the game. The only way to survive is to use your wits.
Your enemies are simple-minded, they only care about destroying you, but they can harm each other and even themselves in the process. You start out as a vulnerable observer, mainly using your location to make enemies shoot at each other, but eventually becoming able to manipulate the environment more and more.
It's what you could call a deconstruction of the genre - shmup clichés are acknowledged and viewed from a different angle.
Brainstorming
The structure is fairly familiar to other shmups. Every zone is divided to imaginary screens with a set of enemies and obstacles. Some of those enemies must be taken down before you move on and new ones spawn. At the end of each zone awaits a unique boss enemy which tests what you've learned during the level. Bosses each represent a certain ability, and by defeating them, you'll gain that ability. I don't think this game will be particularly long, maybe something like 5 or 6 zones, but hopefully with no bad minute!
There will be a small amount of highly specialized enemies in the game, with underlying "rock, paper, scissors" mechanics. As you gain experience and abilities, their functions can be explored more thoroughly, and puzzle elements become more relevant. My philosophy is that instead of introducing new objects for every niche, I find it good design to simply take advantage of interactions between existing objects.
Consequently there are few cannon fodder enemies, many of them are carefully placed to be meaningful when clearing an area. Not all enemies are automatically bad, as their value and killing order depends on the situation. By figuring out their priorities you'll get the most out of every area.
- Turret: They can't move, but their bullets can. Their backs have generators producing energy pellets which seek the player. They're easy to destroy by guiding the bullets back to themselves, so usually it's more useful to let them survive and use those valuable homing bullets for sharp-shooting something else.
- Bomber: They can move, but their bullets can't. Depending on the area they might either follow the player or have pre-defined paths. As the name implies, bombers drop bombs that are triggered by projectiles (but not ships). The bombs' explosions leave behind special walls, which in turn destroy ships that collide with them (but not projectiles). Between their two forms, there are different ways to be manipulate them - I think Turrets' bullets could activate bombs and Sniper' lasers deactivate walls. Needless to say, bombers and bombs have potential for some interesting puzzles.
- Sniper: An ominous fly might float towards you every now and then. When you realize it's actually a crosshair, it's already too late: the Sniper's fired a straight laser beam piercing pretty much everything. What's being pierced should change the effects of the beam somehow. And there's another catch, the energy panels in Turrets' backs work as mirrors, allowing you to pierce things the laser can't reach by itself. Make sure that the Turret you want to use as a reflector has its back against the Sniper, otherwise you'll simply wreck the poor Turret.
Presentation
I have an outline of the graphical style in mind: I'm imagining something crisp and metallic, with large monochrome parts contrasting very detailed parts. Indoor environments would generally mark places where you're learning something new and there's a more linear approach. Meanwhile in outdoor environments, you'd be free to experiment with things you already know, but a perfect completion would take more effort.
Production
I'll do the initial sketches in Python/Pygame. It's a great way to get things from your head to your screen quickly, and I'm the most comfortable with that environment, but it can't handle hundreds of bullets or anything. The final product will probably be in C++/SFML. As of writing this post, I have a primitive but working proof-of-concept with a handful of screens and placeholder graphics:
(The red bullet is the player, the blue ones are shot by the Turret in the center, plus there's three Bombers littering the field with their tiny little bombs, one of which has expanded to a white wall.)
A devlog is surely more of an incentive to keep working on this even when it's not going smoothly. Feel free to give me ideas when I'm in the flow, and harass me when I'm slowing down.
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