I am writing a overhead 2D shoot-em-up game similar to Raptor, and I was wondering if there are any puzzles I can incorporate into the game to make it more challenging and not just about shooting up enemy planes. For example, Doom, a game that is often thought of to be just mindless demon shooting, forced you to solve puzzles such as finding keycards to complete a level.

Well, it might be hard to have something to find since you can only scroll the same way or whatever. However, one puzzle I can think of is having the player shoot things in the right order.

Masters Software

Maybe if you have some way of telling the player that they need to bomb certain areas or coordinates, and they need to figure it out?

Or possibly have some allusion towards a decoy or hostage in a plane, which, if they destroy, will make them lose the level?

Hope that helps.

- Goblin
"In order to understand the full depth of mankind, you must first seperate the word into its component parts: 'mank' and 'ind'."

Are there any AI techniques I can implement into my game to make it more interesting? Also, I was thinking, on some levels your plane could fly into a little enclosed area, turn into a car, and it could be like a game within a game. Anyone got any ideas about these things?