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to weigh in on the arcade game discourse earnestly: i’ve been slowly getting into them more and more lately, playing both shmups and beat em ups, having a great time with both and i think they’re extremely inviting and fun and rewarding even and arguably especially at lower skill levels

the most rewarding thing is feeling a sense of improvement and the worse you currently are, the quicker you can initially improve. i think a core struggle of the genre in a modern, post-emulator and console context is making it very hard for players to access that initial sense of improvement

i think credit feeding is a net good and not the problem. to me learning to clear a shmup is like learning to play a hard song on drums, and so the first thing i do is listen to the song the whole way through. play along a few times with it in my headphones just feeling it out, getting comfortable

yeah like someone who doesnt give a shit about like going full hog into arcade games probably will not care to begin with unless you find some way to hook them and removing the one thing that lets them "complete" them even in the nonstandard way isnt the key i dont think

my gut tells me that, with the massive popularity of roguelikes, a compelling enough "you died" screen is a much better hook to get ppl to care. not to say the solution is to literally get rid of credit feeding, but I think them no longer being front facing defaults would have some upsides

dark souls elden ring bloodborne whatever straight up got people to Like running through from checkpoint to checkpoint in a level and that was already a common thing even in NES games of the time from some of the bigger arcade devs. i truly think more ppl would like them but it's just pure rep atp

what makes that type of runback work for ppl so well is the push of failure -> trial -> satisfaction of making permanent progress after dying a bunch. the default way credit feeding works in a shmup or bump doesn't replicate that, cuz it often respawns you exactly where you died, no progress lost

i dunno how to design to solve it but for my part as someone who enjoys these games but is absolutely not like that highly skilled at all i will simply advocate that they’re good and worth more people trying, and you don’t need to be intimidated by their reputation

I think is a very funny thing specifically to evolve along the meta of everything being a roguelike now those two things are the same