I think a varied line weight would mesh well with the game. I always saw Gimmick as having a style fitting somewhere inbetween the likes of classic hand drawn animation, and something along the lines of SunSoft's own Waku Waku 7 where the colors really pop!.mikejmoffitt wrote: dealing with how to use outlines properly has been more troublesome than I had imagined. I was drawing over an onionskin of the original famicom sprites, scaled to the full size, and chose line widths that would respect roughly the size of one famicom pixel. I think a lack of line weight variation sucks a bit of life out of it. It is something I have to continue to play with.
I'm glad to hear so! Gimmick is a game where it's super fun to just zoom through the stages in a solid flow, so rewarding that would definitely be a good choice! Skilled players would employ star riding for even better times (maybe even have a speedrun mode built in?).mikejmoffitt wrote: Almost certainly there will be a stage timer, or at least a segment timer. I would like the scoring system to reward fast progression and nuanced play over life hoarding.
I often hear people claiming that Gimmick is deviously difficult, so there is definitely some truth to that. The controls really take getting used to, and so does wrapping your head around the fact that the enemies react much more intelligently to your actions than what is usual for an NES game.As for difficulty, unskilled players get thrashed pretty quickly, while skilled players enjoy speeding through the game efficiently. That is already how an arcade game should play. I may have a broken sense of difficulty, because Gimmick has felt like second nature to me for a long time now.
That said, I think once you get the controls down, Gimmick is still a fairly easy game albeit with a few spikes. I wouldn't mind some ways to to further increase the difficulty (maybe dynamically based on player actions, with a higher scoring potential to follow?), but I don't have any specific ideas at the moment.
BIL tends to bring it up every time he namedrops the game Not saying that much outside of what we have already discussed though: Fewer 1ups and a stage/section timer.I am very interested in reading about this shmups thread about making it arcade-ready; have you got a link handy?
Example
There's some more in-depth talk about it somewhere, but I honestly can't find it among the noise.