Horizontal shooter with time reversed = rhythm game

[Kupek]

http://www.retrogradegame.com/

(The same would be true with a vertical shooter, of course, but I wanted the title to make clear I wasn't talking about an FPS.)

[Lox]

Awesome idea and a very unique take on the space shooter genre. I'd definitely play a game like that.

[Zeus]

OK, so it's basically a scripted shooter that you have to play in reverse? What happens when you play it in forward motion?

[Lox]

I'm guessing you don't play it forward.

[Kupek]

You can go forward in time to correct for mistakes. The gameplay is obvious after watching the video. I heard about it because it was mentioned on either Rebel FM or Listen Up as one of the finalists for the Independent Games Festival awards: http://www.igf.com/02finalists.html

[Don]

This looks to me to be something that's different merely for the sake of being different. It is very hard for me to imagine why this kind of gameplay would be compelling.

[Zeus]

This looks to me to be something that's different merely for the sake of being different. It is very hard for me to imagine why this kind of gameplay would be compelling.

Whether you're dodging forward or backwards ain't gonna make a difference. It actually looked very interesting trying to dodge stuff in reverse.

The concern is the "special items" and boss battles that are prevalent in these games. You're not going to be able to do a lot of the neat stuff you can do in current shooters and I'm not sure how you're gonna have the big boss battles and mini boss battles that are at the core of nearly all shooters. If ALL you're doing is dodging stuff in reverse, it's really not much more than a tech demo or a quick diversion

[Zeus]

The gameplay is obvious after watching the video.

Then I must be denser than even the most biased person here thinks I am. I had no clue why he was moving forward.

What is the restriction on correcting mistakes? Do you build up (in reverse? :-) a meter that says how long you can reverse for?

[Kupek]

[scratches head]

Didn't you read the text boxes that popped up in the YouTube video? Maybe I knew too much going into it from the discussion on the podcast. Anyway, your concerns about powerups and bosses might be assuming the scope of the game is bigger than it is.

[Zeus]

[scratches head]

Didn't you read the text boxes that popped up in the YouTube video? Maybe I knew too much going into it from the discussion on the podcast. Anyway, your concerns about powerups and bosses might be assuming the scope of the game is bigger than it is.

I was looking at it at work and was a bit distracted, so I may have missed those.

And that's what I mean. If you are to add a gimmick to a shooter, it needs to work well and not be the only thing the game has going for it. It looks like it works fine but if you take away all that makes a shooter fun (shooting endless waves of enemies is not fun for more than half a stage), it'll be only a gimmick. What I'm trying to find out is whether or not there's anything other than the moving backwards that this game has going for it

[Kupek]

Probably not. I think games at IGF are more about interesting ideas than full games. Much like the conferences I publish in are more about proof-of-concept than industry-strength products.