The engine seems to be working great, but I feel it's missing a kind of Touhou flair to it. It might also have something to do with the fact that MGS is about not getting caught, and the Touhou danmaku aspect comes into play when you are caught. To experience the Touhou part of the gameplay, you have to go against the general goal of the game, which is stealth.
I can see where you're coming from, and that's a problem I've been struggling to solve for a while.
For example, in some of my earlier versions I emphasized the MGS-style gameplay, and gave the player acceleration without thinking about it very much; I just thought that it was more "realistic" than insta-max-speed and would let players to perform pixel-perfect movement easier without using a focus-mode. But almost everyone who tested it complained about the player-character moving too slowly, even though it was quite fast. Thus I removed the acceleration, and everyone seemed to be fine with dodging again. (Funny how you can become almost oblivious to some touches on the gameplay when you get too used to them ^^)
And when you think about it, danmaku and stealth aren't fundamentally that different from each other: You have to avoid something harmful, in danmaku this is enemy bullets, and in stealth this is enemies' fields of vision. I believe that by clever level design you can make avoiding being seen as hectic as avoiding being blasted away by gazillions balls of light.
Of course, I can think of a few drastic differences. First, in shmups you don't usually need to worry about moving forward; the game does it for you, you just focus on dodging and blasting stuff. And since you have some control over your advancing in stealth games, this allows for some item hunting, backtracking and puzzles where you have to figure out what to do (This was most prominent in the MSX Metal Gear titles). And another huge difference is that - as I said - in shmups you "focus on dodging and
blasting stuff." It's true that in most stealth games it's more rewarding the less enemies you directly harm.
As of now, I'm planning to including those adventure game type elements from the old-school Metal Gears in this game, since I actually found them enjoyable.
But as you said, "the Touhou danmaku aspect comes into play when you are caught". I think that's something worth putting some effort into: making the alert phases fun to play off. That means that they should be more rewarding to fight off than just hide. Actually I think that in MGS3, fighting the enemies was way more effective than trying to run away and hide, but that actually irritated me since I don't consider MGS a "shooting game" (more like a "puzzle). ^^ But in this game it makes sense to encourage the player to use action when it seems necessary. Though I don't want the player to intentionally trigger alarms, so I need to find a good balance. (Okay, now I'm starting to sound too elitistic... ^^' I don't really mind if other people play games differently than I do, but I want certain games to encourage certain type of gameplay.)
And we must not forget about boss fights, since they're an important part of both series. I believe this is the area where mixing MGS with a danmaku shooter will provide the most interesting results.
In MG, these have always had the most action in the games, and they're sometimes the only places where you actually have to resort to lethal force (Has it been possible from MGS2 onwards to complete a game without killing a single human being outside cutscenes?). Usually these are a sort of puzzle you have to figure out, and there's often more than 1 answer (Like using a remote controlled missile on a sniper fight, poisoning the enemy with rotten food, or thinking outside the box quite literally). Personally, I find the boss fights of Touhou and most shooting games to have a lot less variety than the bosses in MGS, since even though the music, backgrounds and the bullet patterns look different, they essentially work the same way, but that doesn't mean they aren't fun to play.
What I'm planning to do, is to have the boss fights vary from each other a lot, force the player to use his/her creativity from time to time, and include a metric shit-ton of bullets flying around.
(Please note that I might alter some of my design philosophies if it seems some things just aren't working, but that's not the case just yet.)
Have any of you seen this pic before?
I can't count the amount of crossover pics I've seen of these 2 series.http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/703/mgtouhousample.png/
Ha, that's just awesome! But not exactly the kind of style I'm wishing for this game... Too gritty and "realistic" ^^'
And we couldn't use just edited MG2 sprites, since they have 4 directions, in this game you can move in 8. Or well, it would be possible to use them even then, but I wouldn't find the result satisfactory if the character was not facing the direction it's moving at even when not strafing to get a better aim at the enemy. But if you were talking about making the sprites from scratch, just using a similiar style, then well... by all means, feel free to do so! I would probably find some use for them, even if I ended up choosing something else for the "main" sprites. (Recently 1 volunteer appeared saying that he is willing to try drawing some sprites. Therefore it might not be as urgent to recruit a new artist as I thought.)
Well, this post ended up bigger than usual. And there's so much stuff I didn't even talk about...
