Welcome to our review of the SHMUP Creator, a creation tool for SHMUP games, you know, Shoot them up’s. No, it still does not ring a bell? I’ll explain a bit in my review, so keep on reading. The friendly people over at Bulo Studio were nice enough to send me a review code for their upcoming game (drops the 15th of march) – and I used all my super-advanced coding skills (read: none) to create a SHMUp of my own (and failed horribly). Let’s dive in!
Alright, before I dive into the studio and the game, let’s define what a SHMUP is exactly; A “shoot ’em up,” also known as a “shmup” or “STG” (the common Japanese abbreviation for “shooting games”), is a game in which the protagonist combats a large number of enemies by shooting at them while dodging their fire. The controlling player must rely primarily on reaction times to succeed. Beyond this, critics differ on exactly which design elements constitute a shoot them up. Some restrict the genre to games featuring some craft, using fixed or scrolling movement. Others widen the scope to include games featuring such protagonists as robots or humans on foot, as well as including games featuring “on-rails” (or “into the screen”) and “run and gun” movement. Formerly, critics described any game where the primary design element was shooting as a “shoot ’em up,” but later shoot them ups became a specific, inward-looking genre based on design conventions established in those shooting games of the 1980s.
Shoot them ups!
Shoot them ups are categorized by their design elements, particularly viewpoint and movement:
- Fixed shooters restrict the player and enemies to a single screen; this can also include giving them a single axis of motion. Everything, including movement, is constrained to one screen. Examples include Space Invaders (1978), Galaxian (1979), Centipede (1980), Galaga (1981), Pooyan (1982), Galactix (1992), Love Hero (2019), Doughlings: Invasion (2019).
- Multidirectional shooters feature 360-degree movement where the protagonist may rotate and move in any direction. Multidirectional shooters with one joystick for movement and one joystick for firing in any direction independent of movement are twin-stick shooters.
- Space shooters involve piloting spacecraft in an outer space setting. Following the success of Space Invaders, space shooters were the dominant subgenre during the late 1970s to early 1980s. These games can overlap with other subgenres as well as space combat games.
- Tube shooters feature craft flying through an abstract tube, such as Tempest (1981) and Gyruss (1983). However, there is still a single axis of motion, making these a subset of fixed shooters.
- Rail shooters limit the player to moving around the screen while following a specific route; these games often feature an “into the screen” viewpoint, with which the action is seen from behind the player character, and moves “into the screen.” In contrast, the player retains control over dodging. Examples include Space Harrier (1985), Captain Skyhawk (1990), Starblade (1991), Star Fox (1993), Star Wars: Rebel Assault (1993), Panzer Dragoon (1995), and Sin and Punishment (2000). Rail shooters that use light guns are called light gun shooters, such as Virtua Cop (1994), Time Crisis (1995), and The House of the Dead (1996). Light-gun games “on rails” are usually not considered in the shoot-em-up category but rather their own first-person light-gun shooter category.
- Cute them-ups feature brightly colored graphics depicting surreal settings and enemies. Cute them ups tend to have unusual, frequently wholly bizarre opponents for the player to fight, with Twinbee and Fantasy Zone first pioneering the subgenre, along with Parodius, Cotton, and Harmful Park being other vital games. Some cute them-ups may employ overtly sexual characters and innuendo.
Bulo Studio
So, Bulo created a game where you can create your SHMUP, called SHUMP Creator. Bulo Studio was founded by two industry veterans, namely Corentin Jaffré and Mathilde Soussi. He has been working in the video game industry since 1995 as an artist, then Art and technical director on several games developed in France, England, and Canada for studios like Quantic dreams or Ubisoft. She studied Architecture then got a degree in “Art et Technologie de l’Image”. In 2000 she took “the big step,” following a phone call for an internship offer in a video game company: (looking for someone patient and meticulous to scan slides). Since then, she has been working on several AAA video games: Rainbow Six, Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry II…
They now teamed up to create a new game, which combined their love for said genre. SHMUP Creator allows you to make the Shoot them up of your dreams! As fun as a game, it is straightforward but powerful enough to make professional Shmups. Place your enemies with the mouse, create your bullet patterns, press a button to play, then share your games with your friends! The tutorial is pretty extensive and offers many tips that go pretty deep. It would have been nice to be taken a bit more by the hand, guiding the player through the process of making their first game (or level) instead of just throwing them in the deep. This might sound like an essential feature for people already knowledgeable about game development. Still, it might be a bit steep to tackle for someone who is good at writing words and not developing stuff (or reading diagrams, schematics, etc.). When you look at some of the game footage, the game features on the Steam Store page look imposing, but I couldn’t make anything like that.
Assets and more!
SHMUP Creator gives you everything you need, though, from assets to models to guidelines on how to tackle specific aspects of the game – it’s just a matter of skill. You can even switch between 2D and 3D development, which gives the game a nice look behind the scenes of the development. When I was still in school, I had a course in computer science, which featured a class on both Mediator and GameMaker. So to see where specific tools have developed over the past 15 years or so is pretty impressive – since SHMUP Creator offers you the basics to create your own Sol Cresta, Sin Mora Ex, or even the new FullBlast. I’m pretty sure that someone with the feeling for development and coding can create something like the video below (which is designed with SHMUP Creator).
Conclusion
So, to conclude! SHMUP Creator looks easy on the outside but offers a full-blown game development course (just like RPG Maker did). The options are limitless and are, for the moment, just skill-dependent. I’m not good enough to grasp the simulator concept since I need more guidance in this game. But, seeing what the game is capable of is fantastic, and I can’t wait to see what people will create with this Creator. I hope to see more games like Desert Storm on Steam or even the Nintendo Switch. Just ignore some textual mistakes; they are fixing them as you read this review.
