First steps

I desided that the first thing to do was to resarch into this type of game gener, into shump games and that is exactly meant by 'on rails'.

A shump is a scrolling shoot 'em up game, scrolling from left to right or up and down. The player normaly controls a 'ship' and has to shoot at veriouse enemys/objects on screen, while the screen is scrolling along. These games are generaly scroe driven, awarding the player with points for shooting the veriouse objects. This as well as levels, adds a compertition aspect to the game.

By the term 'on rails', this means that the player is not controling the direction of where they are heading in the game. An example of this may he a pasanger on a train, he can move arond on the train, ie. up and down carriadages, but he canot move off the moving train and the train must stay on the tracks, therefor having a start and a pre-determined ending point.
Anouther example of this would be games that use a light gun, like Time Crisis, the player is not controling the direction in which they move, but are just shooting at the enemys that are on screen.

Thinking Games - Shumps