In Extremis

One of the reasons I think that the genre of the shoot’em ups haven’t seen a revival in the past few years has to do with an adherence to tradition. Most attempts at modern shmup-making veers on the side of homages, sometimes sticking too close at the established rules of the genre, without producing something truly new.

Now, for most people, shmups are simple affairs; usually, every starting coder first project is usually a space blaster of some kind. But the simplicity of implementation does not mean simplicity of design. When researching the origins of the genre in the beggining of development (shmups.com forums were incredibly useful at that time) , I was found out a series of unwritten rules most (good) shooters often apply. Since my goal was to make a shmup that was truly for contemporary audiences, i’ll try to look over what those rules are, and what I am trying to make different in this project.

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Lately, I’ve been tweaking the difficulty setting for In Extremis, which caused me to meditate not only on the concept of challenge in games, but also on the need for it. Difficulty is a treasured topic for me, because it often presents itself as the main barrier of accessibility for people new to videogames. In fact, there are even people suggesting that challenge should be entirely removed, if only to make the medium of videogames more accessible. Well, I could not disagree more; as challenge is not only the soul of games, but perhaps, of art itself.

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One curious side of the indie uprising of the last few years is how it changed many of the predetermined truths about game development; such as, the ideal environment for game development being a large team, all subject to the will of an auteur game designer. I was quite enamored with this idea when I was younger, as every egomaniac would, but my outlook changed with the time, more due to the fact that most videogame auters act more as brands than true creative dynamos (with some exceptions, of course), but also because being distant with the nuts-and-bolts development make you lose what actually the medium is all about.

Now, most indie designers who are not of an computing background code their projects more out of practical issues than anything, but I also believe the great majority of them wouldn’t have it any other way; being able to be close and personal with the machinery of the game allow you to become less of a builder of systems, and more of a sculptor of sensation.

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Like any sort of anachronistic, well-opinionated, mildly deranged group of people, game developers hardly ever agree with one another. except in one point: game developing is hard. Capital-H, all-caps-deserving HARD. Of course, no amounts of reading other game’s postmortems can prepare you for when you have to confront that reality yourself.

But before that, lets wander a bit on some lighter stuff.

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Last time, we were on the very start of the development of INX as a student project, after years of gathering ideas and inspirations. Of course, hardly any idea survives the world outside of the mindscape unchanged, and the same was true for that project. Thank God for that.

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An wise person somewhere in the internet once said that “beginning is often a good place to start”. So before I start rambling incoherently about the bullet pattern coding, hidden metameanings or why the shoot’em up genre is going to save the video game industry forever, perhaps I should give some context on what exactly is this project, and how it started.

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Hi,

welcome to the devlog of the In Extremis project. You can get more information about it in those nifty tabs up top; weekly updates are coming soon. You can keep with the news here by liking In Extremis page on The Facebook, or by following yours truly on The Twitter.

Up until then, stay sharp, star voyagers.