Revisiting Shrimp 'em up, and some lingering thoughts

So... It's been over half a year since the last update, and thanks to a lack of motivation to improve on rushed code and college obligations no real updates have been released for quite a while. But I do want to share my feelings towards this project as I'm not done with the game yet! I'll talk more about this later, since I have a lot of ideas for Shrimp 'em Up that doesn't really fit in with the tools I've been using so far.

I'll be talking about 3 things in this post:

1. Some dev tidbits during its creation
2. My thoughts about the Pixel Game Jam
3. The future of Shrimp 'em Up

About the creation of the game

I had some leftover shmup sandbox scripts I made during January of 2024, made during a time where I was in severe emotional distraught, looking for something to do. Being obsessed with shmups at the time, I decided to make a lil bullet sandbox of my own, with no real gameplay other than being able to spawn bullet patterns using a convoluted menu for enemies.

One of the first things I realized that the movement felt clunky. I changed it slightly, but nothing changed, before realizing that how smooth a character moves isn't solely reliant on the movement of the player itself, but also the illusion of movement and feedback for your actions.

Having a static player image felt bad to move around, so one of the first things I did when making the shmup sandbox was to make character animations that gave feedback based on movement.

The project got put into hiatus for a few months while I spent my time drawing and seeking myself. When Pixel Game Jam got announced to have "Aqua" as it's theme, I immediately knew that I could use my old project as a foundation for a sea related shoot 'em up.

I had to write a bunch of crappy old code from scratch, and rush my project with even more crappy code just to make the game function on time, since I had limited experience using DragonRubyGTK as a game engine and Ruby as a programming language, this being my first game with it. I do have to say though, prototyping this game literally takes one click and changes appear on screen instantly, which I appreciate immensely.

This game wasn't really designed with any inspiration in mind, although a lot of inspiration for its internal mechanics was drawn from YOTSUBANE's Crimson Clover's Time Attack mode, where enemies spawn in waves, and as soon as a wave of enemies is defeated, the next wave immediately appears. The sequence of enemies that appear are set, which allows for routing waves to clear them faster for even more score.

There is also a hidden Rank value which determines the difficulty of enemies that appear, in order to make it fair for newcomers to the genre to experience the game, but also make it brutally punishing for devilish score chasers who crave high numbers. Enemies generally go from being colored red to purple to blue, red being the easiest enemy to take down while blue being the most dangerous. 

My favorite mechanic in the game has to be the massive frying pan cooking everything on the screen. It's over the top, it's completely overpowered, and it's a perfect weapon for the shmup genre. One of my biggest regrets was not properly explaining the game mechanics to the player, as a lot of depth has emerged from the systems I put together, where score exponentially increases as the player gathers more unique foods in their repertoire for dramatic score gains and harder enemies. I remember my highest score in the game being over 30 trillion, indicated by a flashing red number when you reach the threshold.

The music I made for this game was made in a tracker program, not really because I wanted to stay authentic to the genre but simply because it's the only way to make music that I'm familiar with. The first track I made was more NES-Chiptune inspired, and it was so bad I think it caused Geoff Follin to pass away the day after I made it. The second track I pivoted to something different, something more jazzy, and I think it fits the game a lot better and gives it a nice identity that I want to replicate in the future. There's not much else I want to talk about, the sound effects tacked on are rudimentary and basic with no real identity.

One of the things I wish I did when making this game is 1. No mixels and 2. have a coherent color palette. Although the game doesn't look outright bad, I don't think the visuals synergize well, and some things don't fit in too well.

The Pixel Game Jam results

...Oh boy, this was bad. My game was disqualified for no real reason, presumably because they assumed I also participated in Shmup Game Jam that was happening around the same time, even though I read their terms and committed to not participate for more than one Game Jam for this one. It hurt me in the long run, since I feel like I would have received more appreciation if my game was played by people who knew the game genre and appreciated it.

It was poorly administrated, barely transparent, and they ended up never hosting another game jam again because of this one (i think). No slander to the game studio that hosted it, I don't think they knew the repercussions of using a game jam to find what they were seeking. It sounds like a great idea to get people into their studio gone terribly wrong.

I did receive some very nice feedback from the other people in the game jam, in general people found it fun, but not the best thing ever (which is fair, this is my first game after all). I'd like to try and enter a game jam again, maybe GTK later this summer, although with so many talented people participating in a jam like that it makes it quite intimidating to participate.

Either way, my game development spirit still endures. There is a lot more I wish to do with this game, so...

The future of Shrimp 'em Up!

I spent a semester learning how to make games in Unity for college during the fall of 2024 and I'm using my knowledge, damnit. I know Unity is quite frowned upon for indie devs and I should learn to pivot to Godot instead, but I feel like making more things in Unity might allow me to pivot to a job in game development somewhere else.

Yes, there was a game that I made in Unity for my final project. No, I will not be showing that mismanaged piece of crap that no one really wanted to make in the first place because the person that brought up the idea left the group when he couldn't have his perfect AAA game vision. Yes you can have a screenshot of it instead.

Since I'm well used to using Unity at this point, I think I'll be able to make a game that better suits my vision towards what I hope Shrimp 'em up can be, but that is going to take a very long time, since currently my uni obligations take priority.

I'll be remaking the caravan style game mode that this game has brought and polish it up significantly, as well as planning a 5-ish stage arcade mode for people who seek a more traditional arcade playthrough of this game with its mechanics. This is probably going to take up more than a year for me, so it's a far off goal that I will be chipping away slowly with my time when I'm free.

Overall my goal is to make a more approachable shmup catering to beginners while also not making it a breeze for veterans attempting a go at the game. It won't be easy, but plenty of helpful tutorials will guide players to get fundamentals and attain intuition so that they can enjoy other games in the genre. A secondary goal is to promote variety in the shmup genre, other than the (frankly incredibly cool) mecha and future tech theme most games in the genre tend to have.

Conclusion

This game has a lot of significance to me, for what it means to me as a person and for what my potential really is. If you're one of the people who played the game when it first came out, thank you for reading this post! I hope you had as much fun playing the game as I did making it. Hopefully with the knowledge I gained when creating this game, I can use it to make games that I want to play myself in the future.

Shmups are not a popular genre. Make the games you would want to play yourself. Embody the things you want to create. That, I feel, is how you make great games.

[edit April 25, 2025]
...so they deleted the 2024 game jam page for pixel game jam altogether now? I know that it sucked but wow that's kinda lame for my portfolio. Thanks guys.