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Bullet Dive STAGE 01: Stay in Your Lane

by Omar (@neo_graphyte)

Bullet Dive is a series deconstructing the craft of the scrolling shoot-em-up genre. They were originally published on medium.com and have been edited for the clarity and format. You can find the originals and keep up to date here.

There’s a method I’ve noticed in the SHMUP genre that’s been bothering me. I’ve dubbed it “creating a lane”.

Simply put, creating lanes in shoot-em-ups means having enemies fire bullets with timing that forces you into an area for a period of time, limiting your maneuverability. It’s a kind of nebulous concept, something that you know when you see but is difficult to define.

Take the above shot from Raptor: Call of the Shadows: during this moment each of these enemies is set on the same timer for shooting, causing them to all fire at once when they appear on screen. This causes the spaces immediately left and right of the player to now be hostile and blocked off. The spaces further left and right are also blocked off.

Or, better illustrated:

Here the red zones represent areas that are immediately dangerous to you (not precise). Because of your large hitbox, flying through that space is dangerous, and the best option is to wait for those shots to pass and move out of that space in the interim between shots. The blue areas are not immediately dangerous, but moving into the will make them so.

In Raptor your weapons only fire immediately forward (at least to start). This results in a loop where you have to move into the danger zone of the enemy to get shots in, then strafe to the side, and repeat. This removes options and makes the gunplay feel largely static and predefined.

Bullets aren’t the only thing that can create lanes. Often games that are guilty of this also use them in tandem with enemy formations that enforce that spacing. Check the above from The Blue Flamingo. Let’s mark it out again:

Over on the right you can find the player craft. Marked in red are the danger zones from the bullets, and in blue is the danger zones created by the enemy trajectories. You can see that dodging either fire or the enemies will have you pushed to one side of the screen, awaiting either the bullets or enemies to leave the screen to enter the zone where you can attack the enemy, or cross over to the other side of the screen.

Let’s try this with a horizontal SHMUP (Enemy Mind):

Player character in purple in the lower left corner. Again, you can see where the safe zones are and how it forces you to the outer edges. Enemy Mind is interesting however, in that you can fire your conscious into enemy ships to take control of them. In this situation you can sneak into the danger zone, fire yourself into an enemy ship, then have more maneuvering room as you’ve effectively placed yourself behind the enemy line. Things get stickier when you come across situations like this:

I don’t think I need to mark these out for you. However, do note that the curving trajectories of the bullets in the left half of the screen effectively mean they take up larger zones. The green glowing enemy at the bottom right can also fire a laser that cuts across the whole screen.

“Can’t you just proactively shoot the enemies in front of you?”you might ask. Well, no. In most of the examples I’ve given, enemies also require multiple hits, meaning you need to expose yourself in those areas for even longer. Enemy Mind is the exception, but the large hitboxes and ammo mechanic complicate that as well.

Of course, you have to expose yourself to enemy fire at some point in any game. Being able to do so, however, requires you to have the tools to properly retaliate and use that position to gain control of a space, not simply move in and out of it until the enemy is destroyed. An example from Crimson Clover:

Bullets are in pink and blue. I’ve marked the hitbox of your player ship in yellow. The bullets here are creating “lanes” and the enemies firing them take multiple hits(unlike most of the fodder enemies you see throughout the game and in the lower plane in the screenshots. So what’s the difference between this and the others?

The difference is that the small hitbox and rhythms of the shots allow you to maneuver between the streams. The bullets are fired in small clusters, with a short but obvious rhythm that allows you through. In the image on the right you can also see that the blue shots near the bottom also spread out as they travel, allowing you to travel through the spaces in the clusters themselves. Notably, the shots themselves are also fired from the sides of the enemies as well (check the left screen). This allows you to get in the middle of the two danger zones created and retaliate against the enemy safely and continuously, instead of moving in and out of the space in front of them. (Some enemies in Raptor also fire shots like this, but your large hitbox makes getting into that space infeasible.)

There’s also the fact that your shots look like this:

The spread of your shots is both wide and generous, ensuring that you don’t need to hit them head on to do damage (though doing so will cause more). This also somewhat negates the need to be accurate when firing and puts a focus on maneuvering.

One series that’s actually fond of using a similar technique to box you in is Gradius. Check out these shots from Gradius Gaiden and V:

This is a recurring gimmick. Here either the limbs or the lightning on the top and bottom create a continually moving danger zone that forces you into a certain space. Again, the tools provided allow you different vectors of attack. The constantly moving danger zone also prevents it from becoming a stagnant routine of moving in and out of the danger zone to get pot shots in.

Of course, these systems are inextricably linked to others, mutating and morphing between games and situations. These definitions are malleable, only theories and ideas hopefully useful to understanding the form. Even the “lanes” discussed here often rely on a certain set of variables, shot speeds, rhythms, etc. to exist. Hopefully, that helped give you an appreciation of the complexity of design on display. Until next time!