(2023-05-31) Why I consider danmaku the best (graphic-based) game genre ever
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As someone who used to have a secondary YouTube channel with "Shmup-o-mania"
in its name, I might be somewhat biased in this topic, you might think. But, 
as usual, that superficial observation can lead to false conclusions. Yes, I 
do like shmups (or, as snobs like to point out, "it's shoot-em-up and I hate 
anyone who shortens this name!!111") and consider the entire genre heavily 
underrated nowadays. I won't go into the details of how and why (probably 
will write about it later if I have enough inspiration) but the modern shmup 
scene is really nearing the underground. And its most successfully surviving 
subgenre actually never was _that_ popular among the general public, but it 
is the small but active and truly independent community of hardcore players 
and aspiring developers that still keep it alive and well. In Japan, this 
subgenre is known as "danmaku", but everyone else in the world might be more 
familiar with the "bullet hell" term. To the unsuspecting folks, danmakus 
might look like normal 2D shmups, just with more acidic and/or fantasy-like 
aesthetics (although neither of that is always the case) and much more 
bullets to dodge which makes it look like it's impossibly hard to play 
(hence the name "bullet hell"). However, there are several _fundamental_ 
differences between danmakus and other shmups.

And the biggest of them, in my opinion, is how collisions are handled. In
traditional shmups, all sprites are treated as geometric shapes, and, 
obviously, you take damage when an enemy bullet sprite or an obstacle sprite 
hits your sprite, and an enemy takes damage when your bullet sprite hits the 
enemy sprite or a vulnerable zone of it. So, the main collision rule of 
traditional shmups is: the hitbox must be equal to the sprite shape unless 
explicitly stated otherwise. As sprite shapes can be (and usually are) very 
irregular, this makes collision detection very computationally expensive and 
non-trivial in general. Danmakus, on the other hand, treat things very 
differently: what you actually see on the screen has nothing to do with what 
can be hit. Your player's hitbox is usually a small circle or rectangle in 
the middle of the actual sprite. And all the particles flying around are 
similarly constructed circles or rectangles. This allows to generate much 
more of them at the same time on the screen and compute their positions and 
collisions much faster. And only then, after they are determined, the actual 
sprite graphics is drawn around those hitboxes. Such mechanics allow the 
player to perform maneuvers that look impossible to anyone just watching the 
gameplay. And the player's hitbox is usually highlighted as a bright circle 
dot in the center, making it even easier to know when you're about to 
collide with something.

Another thing very characteristic for danmakus is little to no randomness in
the bullet patterns and their sequences. Bullets are released in 
preprogrammed "waves" that one can learn how to dodge. While traditional 
shmups sometimes introduce random elements to diversify the gameplay a bit, 
danmakus can only change the order of these waves, but even that is rare. 
That's why danmakus' main focus is not the player's reaction speed and 
agility but solely seeking the correct tactics to further advance through 
the game. To some extent, I'd agree with the statement that danmakus, as a 
genre, are more like action puzzles disguised as shmups. This approach also 
makes danmakus more suitable for procedural level generation, especially for 
"boss rush" type games where you don't have to design levels themselves, 
just bosses and their bullet patterns. Finally, there are some danmakus that 
can hardly be classified as shoot-em-ups at all, because you just can't 
shoot anything in them, only dodge waves of bullets and survive through the 
levels this way. But this doesn't make such danmakus less interesting to 
play, as, as I stated earlier, their focus is on learning tactics. 
Oftentimes, regardless of whether you can shoot or not, you also get 
additional points (called "graze points") if you have dodged a bullet whose 
hitbox was very close to yours, and you won't see such things in any 
traditional shmup, because, again, they are much harder to calculate for 
non-primitive hitbox shapes.

And the paradox of all this is that danmakus only look complicated, but in
fact they are much easier both to program _and_ to play. And if I, one day, 
create my own (graphic-based) game engine for anything beyond a 
point-and-click quest (will talk about this another time), it will be a 
danmaku engine. Like shmups themselves, this subgenre of them definitely is 
the most underrated today for what it actually can offer.

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