OK, SO WHAT THE HECK IS #SHUMP?

author=LockeZ
Magi, what would you describe as what you saw #shmup's ideals as?

I didn't want to make any big posts because it's not my style, but I've never really explained myself or said anything about shmup, so I guess I'll go renege on what I said above and say some things.

Shmup has been existing as #meridiandance for some time now and is now a small subsidiary of Ghost in a Bottle and Sons Corporation. (http://ghostinabottle.com/) Officially on paper, our ideals are whatever they mandate.

Outside of corporate bedchambers, we're all game makers with our own distinct art aesthetics and design philosophies just like everybody else! Our projects are things we're working earnestly on and most of us have picked up more essential skills such as scripting languages, pixel art, sound design, and new development software in the years since we left.

Ideals-wise, we believe actual perfection is impossible, which is why it's good to pursue it forever so you never stop improving. Nobody wants to plateau early so it's good to criticize everything: Your community, the 'industry', your friends, and yourself! The more critical you can be, the better that person's product will end up. I think that is partly the reason why people have called the atmosphere "toxic" or "cutthroat", but it's not like we're living in a virtual snake pit of Machiavellianism. Except for maybe Ghost, but true to his name, none of us currently knows where he is.

Some people, particularly Ciel were very constructive in his criticisms and suggestions for RMN and he had lot of great design philosophies he wanted to share. I think that the presentation was a bit too heady for some people here though. Users who don't really think art and critical thought is a big serious thing for indie games would just see these huge blocks of text and just kind of go "/spit So what?"

The writing was scribbled on the wall in red crayon, possibly by Ankylo before his own similar meltdown. The 'shrimp crew' was just stubborn to leave at that point, and the more resistance we perceived from the other end, the less some of us began to care. That's when the shitposting, the fakeposting, the troll baiting, and the general irreverence hit full throttle for me at least. I like to think that the deeply malevolent "Chaos Dragons" incident was my cul-de-sac buildup to a final statement before I jumped out of the fifth story window of RMN's submissions queue building. (I've seen things you people wouldn't believe, etc) I never got that far, but it was probably better for me that shortly following I was forced to leave instead of being asked.

Corfasius
It was all in their delivery, really. Even if they had a point, their noses in the air made the message all too clear that they saw us as filthy, ignorant commoners who needed their guidance regardless of how it came across, when the least we wanted was democracy.

RMN was never a democracy even before all of those events. WIP quite publically stated it before in threads and used it as a point of leverage to resist repeat calls to make certain changes to the main site. Believe it or not this was a pain to us as well. Looking briefly at the main page, it looks like a lot of the problems with project exposure have been solved since then, but this departure from WIP's refusal to budge seems to have really cluttered up the site badly!

Even though I said a lot of us were quite critical of what we saw as regression and stagnation, content quality and inexperience was never a problem. People aren't 'filthy peasants' just because they aren't experienced with making games. It's good to have a safe and productive place to make mistakes and improve, but when people begin to react with hostility to criticism and go as far to behave like anti-intellectuals, it's hard to continue taking those people seriously! I agree it would have just been better to pack up and leave if that felt like such a problem, but some people in shmup thought we could change the community we had been with since the beginning. We didn't really succeed in changing anything and there aren't any physical scars left here, but it looks like by the existence of this thread there might be some psychological ones!

In any case, RMN isn't our community now and at least for me it won't be again. There aren't any shrimp specters looming over the website cursing its continued existence, and nobody here is actively trolling threads to mock. Well, maybe TFT is, but you can't expect anything less of the "Worst Moderator" award recipient... It's just his culture, please try to understand

As for myself, I'm really over the things that have happened. Time is quick to make a fool out of people. If anybody here doesn't feel the same way and wants to berate us or just engage covert mole operations, you can find all of RMN's one-shot villains on espernet's IRC network. You can probably figure out the channel.

I guess that's it!

author=Feldschlacht IV
I'm cool with some of the old shmup peeps. They're really excellent game designers, and some of them (who I've met personally) are really rad people. Let's just say that after shmup sort of split up and died some of the more mellow ones recognized that some of the other ones indeed had some uh...issues. The group as a whole is pretty much entirely dead though.

TWAS A DARK TIME

I came here to say essentially this. I've got a lot of respect for some of their design sensibilities.

Huh. I have been called the most pro-critcism person on RMN by the current administrator, and am also one of the largest presences on the forums, so I don't think you'd be shunned away by anyone if you came back. You can't possibly be worse than me. I think your mentality would be perfectly welcome on RMN today. I mean there are always gonna be people who get their knickers in a bunch but fuck those morons. I think I would probably get along well with most of the shmuppers.

As the tagline says, "You guys are awesome at hating things and I like that."

author=tardis
also shit damn, are you still making games ChaosProductionsLouisCyphre?

i am

author=tardis
that game was cool.

don't, it's bad

author=UPRC
Seeing Bill & Ted all over this page makes me want to go home and watch their movies.

But man, I really hope that they don't go ahead with a new movie. They're way too old to play those roles now.

The crux of the sequel's story is that they are both old and haven't done jack shit to usher in a new age.

There's always going to be some kind of fun legacy with the site's past, whether that involves #shmup's antics, my own, or someone elses. I think it would be hard pressed to point at #shmup members and say they were lacking in passion, though. People may have disagreed with their... flavor of speech.

from tardis
seriously though i don't know where this "you guys hate everything don't you" thing came from, that is pretty much completely the opposite of the experience i've had with "the shmups."

To be fair, that tag line is very tongue-in-cheek, and anyone who reads it literally is missing its meaning entirely. It's a jab at destructive criticism, basically. I don't know how far brutal honest goes with the shmuppers, but I've always believed criticism can be direct and useful without being insulting OR sugar-coated. It's just that without a tinge of sweetness, even fair and level criticism can be taken personally by over-sensitive developers.

a solid bro was all I ever aspired to be

I was curious what #Shmup was for a long while. I don't know if this was related a few years back, but I remember getting into the crossfire from some users..that sort of got really riled with me everytime I made a post, and was during the whole Final Tear Incident, I'm not sure if both were inter-related somehow.

Speaking of Final Tear, he is still working on those old projects, and has made alot of progress.

author=Liberty
Nah, FT came way after #shmup left town. FT3... I wonder if he ever fixed the walk speed... or realised that half his systems were redundant in 2k3... or allowed skipping for the tutorials... or added shorcuts through the three dungeons that you had to go through twice in the first part of the game... or a lot of things really.

Surprisingly, he took a lot of those criticisms nowadays for FT3, and vastly improved by the looks of it when I last visited his website, but been reluctant to replay it for right now since it is a incredibly long game (which I don't mind) since I like those types of RPGs. Seems like he wants to make FT3 his legacy, and I'm glad he never gave up on it.

So I guess that other stuff that happened was just random drama going on, I really have not seen those users since then or that I just don't remember their usernames anymore.