Dogyuun

Dogyuun

Dogyuun is a vertical shooting game developed and published by Toaplan in 1992, and one of the few titles created by the company that has not received any ports to home platforms to date. It is set on a fictional planet called Dino, where the player faces off against a race of robotic aliens holding the planet hostage. The player ship in Dogyuun is known as the Sylfer, and is equipped with a tractor beam that can grab smaller enemies and item containers and carry it with them.

Dogyuun offers a fairly simple gameplay experience held up by a very strong visual and audio presentation, solid game difficulty, and overall game intensity. It has received criticism for its relative simplicity compared to other games in the genre (and others made by Toaplan), as it doesn't particularly innovate in any strong ways, aside from a unique multiplayer mechanic where one player can use the tractor beam on another player in order to form an extremely strong ship with double the firepower. It also has received criticism regarding a counter-stop present due to an oversight in the boss design and the tractor beam mechanic.

Gameplay Overview

Dogyuun is a three-button vertical shooting game.

• A: Fires the equipped weapon
• B: Uses the player's equipped sub-function (a one-time Bomb, or a thruster system that massively increases movement speed)
• C (Hold): Activates the ship's tractor beam, which can grab small enemies and item containers -- press C again after grabbing an object to release it

There are ten stages in the game, and the game loops forever, in theory. However, due to a programming error, the game soft-locks after the fifth loop, so the game is considered to only have four loops.

Scoring

Scoring in Dogyuun is about as simple as it gets, with a flat amount of points awarded for destroying enemies and collecting score items. The player can gain 10 points every 10 frames by grabbing an object with the tractor beam. Collecting a power-up that the player is already holding will reward them with 5000 points. There are also score items that reward the player with 5000 points when collected, but for the most part, these only appear in Stage 3.

Each loop of the game increases the overall score potential, but there are no particular score systems in the game.

Development History

From the start, Toaplan's goal with Dogyuun was to make a game with the best visuals possible, in response to criticism on the visuals of their previous games. Since graphics were their main focus with Dogyuun, the team were unable to put a greater focus on the gameplay, which they felt was "unimaginative". A significant amount of development time was spent on designing and animating huge bosses. [1]