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. 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.

• A: Fires the equipped weapon
• B: Uses the player's equipped sub-function
• 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

Weapons & Sub-Functions

Dogyuun features four primary weapon types, selected by collecting a colored weapon capsule that cycles between red, blue, purple, and green. There are no weapon upgrades to collect; collecting the same weapon rewards the player with 5000 points. Uniquely, if you tag in a second player, and tractor beam their ship, your ships will fuse together into a super-ship, allowing the player access to stronger versions of these four weapons. Weapon names are referenced from a rough auto-translation from a Japanese webpage[1], and most will just call the weapon by its color.

Weapons

• Mega Shot (Blue): The default player shot. Fires a straight beam forward that shrinks as it's out. Fire rate can be increased by rapidly pressing A. When equipped with the Thruster, smaller lasers are also shot from the side of the player's options. This weapon is quite powerful, despite being the player's default weapon.
• Psycho Beam (Purple): A curving shot that bends towards enemies. It deals a respectable amount of damage, and can hit targets several times, but it is limited in the amount of firepower that can be on-screen at once.
• V-Laser (Green): Two bolts of lightning curve out of the ship. The advantage of this weapon is that it can consistently damage anything in its path, and its path can be left out indefinitely, but it is by far the weakest weapon in the game, only finding use in particularly unique situations. (Also, the sound effect of this weapon is an assault on the ears, and you'll probably want to switch ASAP just because of that.)
• Homing Fire (Red): A homing shot that curves in 90 degree angles towards its targets. Fire rate can be increased by rapidly pressing A, allowing it to deal great damage with point-blanking, and its movement patterns make it slightly more useful than its Purple counterpart.

Sub-Functions

• Bomb: Releases a one-time use bomb that grants the player invincibility and deals significant damage to any enemies unlucky enough to be caught in its path. The bomb is strong enough to destroy many sub-bosses in the game alone.
• Thruster: When pressed down, the player's movement speed is massively increased, granting them the ability to dart across the screen. This sub-function is highly useful, but must be used carefully in order to avoid jetting straight into bullets or airborne enemies.

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 about every 10 frames by grabbing an object with the tractor beam and holding onto it, which can be a considerable challenge considering that the object being held can also be destroyed by enemy fire and collisions. 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 (including the score gained from tractor beaming objects), but there are no other particular score systems in the game.

Counter-stop

Due to the a combination of the design of the tractor beam's bonus point mechanic, various safespots in boss encounters, and bosses not timing out, it is possible to achieve several different counter-stops in Dogyuun. Some bosses can be rendered completely defenseless via boss part destruction, or have places on the screen that they are unable to hit the player at (top left of the screen seems to be common in Dogyuun). When holding an object with the tractor beam in one of these situations, it's possible to leave the game untouched from that point on, and eventually acquire huge amounts of points, forever. The automatic point gain from the tractor beam is also increased in subsequent loops, making the strategy particularly lucrative in the third or fourth loops of 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. [2]