1. shooting enemies or other targets
2. dodging or otherwise dealing with hazards (enemy shots, possibly walls, etc.)

Part of the shooting activity comes down to reflexes and action-gaming skill. How well do you do at sending your shots where you want to? But there's also a lot of room for creating interesting choices for the player here.

If you have a limited special ability, when do you use it, and what do you use it on? For example, in Sin and Punishment 2, you have a charge shot that you can use every 15 seconds or so. If you don't use it at an opportune time, the challenge will be needlessly hard and you'll probably take more damage; if you use it at a bad time, you won't have it available when you need it, with the same result. This requires the player to assess each situation and decide whether it's worth using the charge shot now.

Which enemies do you target first? If you have multiple attack resources, which enemy gets which one? Again, try to design things to require the player to assess the situation and make decisions about priorities and how to approach each challenge. In a fast-paced action game, these decisions are split-second and partly subconscious, but nonetheless the game needs to generate plenty of interesting decisions of this type to be interesting.

The other half of the game is the stuff that the other stuff is shooting back at you. In the typical shooter, you have free movement, and your main response to hazards is to move to avoid them. While thinking about these matters, I've realized that this part of the game is a much bigger part of the shooter design than I'd realized. Even setting aside games such as the Touhou series that are mostly about dodging, a shooter where you're not dodging shots is a boring shooter.

What are some common player choices in the dodging activity?Where do you move to? If you dodge well, can you set yourself up for some good shooting? (Consider that in most shooters, your direction of fire is fixed. If you can aim freely, that can actually wind upreducingthe player's decision-making if you don't watch out.) If you have other ways to deal with hazards (say, a limited shield ability), which do you use?

So the immediate thorny (pun unintended) question before me is how to make Ninja Tree fun if you can't move and therefore can't dodge. My main ideas at this point are to focus on making interesting choices in the shooting action, and give the player multiple solutions to shots to try to make some interesting choices there.

First, for the shooting action: Make the player recognize which enemies to go after first. Make the player decide where to send reflected shots. If you do badly at these activities, the enemies will get off more shots and you'll get hit more.

For dealing with shots, one obvious step is to make some shots miss the player (currently, all are perfectly aimed). This is a cheap (in both senses) way to add some interest. The player has to identify which shots are actually hazards; if you spend time dealing with shots that would miss you anyhow, you'll be in trouble.

I'm not sure about letting you shoot down enemy shots, but I think there needs to be some way for you to deal with shots besides the short-range circular slash. The shooting-shots mechanic may work out well, especially if I work on making it so enemy shots aren't usually lined up with enemy characters.

I may try making reflected shots clear out bullets in the vicinity. Maybe do that in place of your shots destroying enemy shots.

There's a shot: should I shoot it? ignore it? wait for it to get close and sword it? That sounds like the core of a promising game to me. We'll see how it works.

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