isaachaworthgamesdesign

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Week 14c- Hell Riders Postmortem

The assignment said that this was a week 13 task, but the assignment is due in week 14 and I believe having the final posts posted when the assignment is due is more appropriate as I can mention all of the final changes made to the game before my final comments...

The Game

I am vey happy with what we were able to get done with the game and how the game does meet the MVP for the most part

My Role as animator and director

With my role as animator/artist, I am pretty happy with what I was able to get done.

As for my role as the main directing force behind the game, I do feel like I could have done more to get the team moving. There were times where I told the team what to do and it would be done, but there were times when one or two members were waiting around to be given tasks.

I know at points there were times that I did have to get into the coding side of the game as a result of these points of inaction.

My Team

When I do put things into perspective, not many people in the team actually worked on the game code itself. Most of the game itself was made by me and Sage while Nishant and Mahzar worked on other sides of the game like gathering playtesters and making the backgrounds.

Where to Improve Upon?

I will admit, we were a little slow at the start. We could have started this game's development within week 10 if I remember correctly however we decided to hold back on that thought and instead took a week to decide on which game to continue with. If we came to a decision during that week then we might have had enough time to get more of the game complete such as Bel's second phase and other MVP tidbits.

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Week 14b- Designing the Bosses- Belphegor

Finally we reached in development the last boss of the MVP to build- Belphegor. Given they are the last opponent in the game, we need ot make sure they bring on the pain.

Idea vs Design

During my designing of Bel, something rather strange happened- During the spriting process I hit a brick wall rather early. Not the most dastardly of stops but it was the problem that I couldn't get Bel's design to work with my spriting style. This lead to what Fullerton would describe as an "idea vs design". converting something free like an idea into something as detailed and planned out as a design. In the end, I needed to improvise and ended up changing Bel into a woman as it fitted how my spriting was ending up

What was in my head vs what I ended up with (art on left from Forgotten Realms Wiki https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Bel#Gallery)

Phase 1

The first phase he sits upon his throne behind a forcefield while countless turrets and minions attack.

Bel was hands-down the most complicated enemy I had to sprite up for the game, totalling to 42 images for her animations, plus an additional 27 images for her throne, turrets, barrier, attack projectiles, and terrain. This meant I had to make 69 sprites for this phase alone.

The following were the attacks I designed for Bel:

Kiss of Fire

Belphegor sends out a kiss that manifests into a blazing heart that explodes into a barrage of projectiles that home into the player.

The original plan for this attack was that Bel would hurl a firball at the player that would do the same thing but given the change in Bel's design, I decided to have a little fun and change the attack into a blazing explosive heart she smooches towards you.

Lava Raise

Bel raises her hand, causing three pillars of flame to erupt from the ground beneath the player in fixed intervals

This move was animated for but not implemented in the final version as Sage could not get it to work. Luckily enough she has enough in her kit that even without this move she still functions nicely as a boss.

Sword Swing

Bel swings her sword after a brief windup

Bel, much like other complex enemies, has a threat level, at the highest value of this threat level, Bel lets loose a great swing from her sword- resulting in a slash that covers a large portion of the screen.

Turrets

Hugging the right wall are four turrets that let out bullets towards the player. Destroying all four of these turrets disables Bel's force field and makes her vulnerable to attacks.

Retaliation

This attack occurs upon recovering from her stunned state which happens when enough turrets are destroyed. In this attack, she performed the slash attack again and respawns all slain turrets.

Phase 2?

Unfortunately for development, me and the team realized that there wouldn't be enough time to implement Bel in with both phases. Given they won't make it into the game, here's one animation I had for it

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Week 14a- Designing the Enemies- Level 3

Hell Wasps

Horse-sized wasps that fly onto the screen, and after a brief pause, charge directly towards the player. Upon collision, they return back to the right side of the screen and repeat the process until they kill or are killed.

Compared to their initial sprites made for the MVP document, I have given them quite the glowup. Granted, the hell wasp was probably I one of the few that was very much in a work in progress state when I made the MVP document, so them getting such an overhaul visually makes sense.

Before:

After:

This new look was a lot better than what I had before and had a lot more detail that the original was missing. Coding on the enemy from what I heard about from Sage was a bit of a mess, something I think he would be describing in his blog (hopefully)

Animating the wasp wasn't too difficult, and ended up totalling to 12 images- the same amount as the boss Sibriex which is kind of funny when you think about it.

Imps

Simple enemies that fly onto the screen, shoot three bullets in a row at the player, and fly off the screen.

I actually forgot to mention an enemy so I'll bring them up here, woops! Here's how they went.

The imps were among the first of the enemies to be sprited out as shown by the MVP document having their final form in it. They totalled to 9 images made for them.

Diablo Engine The largest and most powerful of the standard enemies, they possess the most weapons, including a flamethrower that is just a rapid spray of bullets in a wave pattern, a laser cannon that fires a laser directly in front of them that cannot be stopped by any means, and explosive shots that unleash a spray of bullets in all directions upon reaching a certain distance.

The last of the basic enemies to be sprited, the diablo engine totalled to 28 images made for its animations, and was another enemy I fully coded, so I'll go into some detail with its attacks.

Basics

The Diablo Engine was designed to serve as a "miniboss"- an enemy that was a boss fight in its own right, as such it sports the most attacks out of any basic enemy and fights similarly to the Soul Grinder. Much like Sibriex and the tormentor, the diablo engine utilized the threat system, rolling that same d6+Threat to choose its attack on any given cycle.

Attack 1: Flamethrower

The most basic attack, the diablo engine fired a snaking volley of bullets towards the player that moved in an 'S' pattern.

Attack 2: Laser

Taking inspiration (chapter 1, fullerton) from the Soul Grinder, the Diablo Engine too has a screenwide laser attack. Some people would call this lazy for making an enemy do the exact same move as a boss, but I like to think of it as an admission that the player is getting more skilled- skilled enough that even the what served as bosses earlier in the game can now be encountered as basic enemies. This

This attack occurs halfway through its threat value at results 6-8.

Attack 3: Charge

The last of its attacks, the engine would play an animation, then charge towards the left side of the screen. Once there, it flips around and charges even faster to the opposite side. Upon arriving, it flips back to its starting position and returns to normal. This attack occurs on a roll of 9 on the dice and resets the attack pattern.

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Week 13d- Designing the Bosses- Sibriex

Sibriex was an interesting boss to implement as it ended up being the one that required the least animations, totalling to only 12 sprites being used for animation.

A giant demonic head roiling with spirits of the damned, this ugly mug attacks using its various pieces of anatomy. Lasers from its eyes, strong winds shot out by its nose to pull the player in or push them away, pimples that grow and burst into sprays of bullets, and a mouth that bites down on players that get to close for comfort.

So how was that ugly mug animated? Well in short it was done in engine by a sway plugin- a system used to simulate grass blowing which worked surprisingly well to get across a jiggle effect on the enemy.

As described by its MVP description, it is not all one object, but a collection of objects as shown below

Every part of its body has its own hp, except the main part of its body which instead kept track of how many parts of its body was still alive. If all of them were dead, it would delete itself.

The main reason for this shortcut in animation was that we were approaching the deadline for the assignment, meaning we were running out of time and I also had to animate the boss after it with Belphegor.

Sibriex was entirely coded by me and uses a couple of techniques.

How does its body stick together?

As mentioned, its body consists of five distinct parts, so the question stands- how is it kept cohesively together?

The answer? Boids movement.

The boids movement behaviour allowed objects to move as part of a swarm, by having them then programmed to follow distinct points on the body without rotating this movement allowed the sibriex to move around and gave it a wobbly behaviour.

Attacks?

Each part of its body had timers that allowed them to attack individually- each of its two eyes shot out bursts of bullets, its mouth vomited out a violent wave of bullets and its nose used the same threat mechanic the tormentor had- alternating between a sneeze attack and a blow attack that pushed the player backwards for 10 seconds.

When a body part was destroyed, it was replaced by a wound that sprayed out bullets in an often shorter timer than the body part it lost- creating a flow where the fight got more and more desperate as it went on. This was done in place of the more random spawning pimple attacks.

What got cut?

Not everything Sibriex had planned was carried over however. Originally, I had planned a bite attack for the mouth however it proved difficult and was scrapped. Additionally, Sibriex had a suck attack but I could not get that to work either despite getting the blow attack to work. Finally, I had plans for attacks where it would charge you with its body or sink under the water and dive out to attack you. But those two were scrapped for not working. If we had more time then these attacks probably would have made the cut, but unfortunately our time was running short and we had the rest of the game to make.

[isaachaworthgamesdesign]

Week 13c- Designing the Enemies- Level 2

With most of the results fixed up with plans on fixing up the Health Bar later, we moved on to implementing more enemies

Damned Spirit

Exclusive to level 2, these enemies jump out of the water from telegraphed puddles in line with the player’s X coordinates and attempt to collide with the player. When they do, they attach for a brief duration, applying a downward force. If too much downward force is applied to the player, they die instantly as they are dragged into the damned waters.

While originally planned only for level 2, the spirits were implemented into level 3. To signify collision with the player, the spirits deleted themselves and spawned a new number of spirits that orbited around the player based on a new variable we added to the player exclusively for this enemy.

The spirit totalled to three frames of animation.

Infernal Skiff

Exclusive to level 2, these hell boats skim across the water and let loose bombs directly upward that explode into bursts of bullets.

A relatively straightforward enemy all things considered, the skiff did not require much to be done, totalling to three frames of animation.

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Week 13b- Implementing Feedback and Iterative Design

Following the advice in Fullerton, we compiled the data gathered during the playtesting party and then got to work solving the issues that came up before continuing with the rest of development. The following was what was fixed up this week:

Fixing the Movement

This was something I couldn't figure out when I first start work on this assessment, but when I finally sat down with the goal to fix it, I realized how easy it was to fix. My biggest problem with the movement for a top-down character was the Acceleration and Deceleration settings as they were features I couldn't turn off in the behaviours box. What this meant was that the characters had a level of "Ice Physics" or "Floatiness" to them that I believed at the time was irremovable.

Turns out the solution was dead easy. All I had to do was speed up the acceleration and deceleration to a high enough speed that the player would reach max speed or stop to a standstill to what they would perceive as an instant. Before the acceleration/deceleration was a little above the player's max speed. Now the acceleration/deceleration is at a value of 10 000 units each. That solved the problem.

Solving the I-Frame Deathspiral

This was also a surprisingly easy problem to fix, when going through our code, a lot of the character's attacks and abilities had an extra requirement that they needed to not be invincible for the ability to trigger. As a result, we could just remove that requirement and lo and behold the characters played much better after the change.

Changing this effect did mean something though, which was that Peter's Shift needed to be touched up now.

Enhancing Peter

While not the biggest comment, I recall a player mentioning that Peter felt a little awkward to play so I decided to touch him up. For the most part, all I did was increase the size of his primary fire's bullets, allowing them to hit their mark better. I also gave an arc to his grenade and added a new property to his shift.

Whenever the player uses shift as Peter, they will now gain an additional benefit where if they use LMB or RMB while invincible from shift, they will end it early and fire additional shots of each from their gun. This was done to help with the I-Frames fix as the player would be able to shoot perfectly fine during Peter's Shift so we made it so it ended early but empowered the attack used to exit it.

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Week 13a- Playtesting Party Results

With the playtesting party today, I went to Uni along with Nishant and Mahzar to gather valuable playtesting data that we can then iterate on as described by Fullerton in Games Workshop. A total of seven testers were found for the game, with varying levels of skill between them.

The following is some of the feedback

General Feedback

Movement/dodging is weird- It was described by the playtesters as the momentum feeling off, dodgin from a standstill being hard, jank and to have a "bit of sway". Despite all of this, one tester did describe the movement as good (tester 7)

Get a HP bar for the boss- at the time, only the soul grinder was there as a boss and we hadn't gotten around to giving it a health bar. This feedback was reinforcement on that fact

Disapproval from being unable to attack during I-Frames (invincibility frames): At this point in development, the player could not attack after taking damage and can only attack if they currently weren't in I-Frames. This lead to several playtesters going into a death spiral where they would get hit once, then break out of I-frames only to be immediately hit again, being unable to fight back in the process.

Peter felt a little weird: only one of the testers noted this, but I took note regarding it as he should feel the best to play considering the intent behind his design.

Miscellaneous Comments

This section is just a collection of comments and reactions that were gotten during the playtesting process that I found amusing. Most of these are in reaction to the boss and were the kinds of reactions that I enjoy to hear:

"Just trying to survive" "Ah!" "Oh my days..." "Dude there's a boss!" "Oh my F****** god!" "I am so bad at this" "Oh god I'm gonna die..."

[isaachaworthgamesdesign]

Week 12d- Designing the Bosses, Soul Grinder

In this blog, I'll go over the spriting and animations for the first boss of the game, the Soul Grinder. In total, the soul grinder had a total of 32 images used in its animations, which does include 2 for the missiles it fires and 7 for the exhaust emitted from its backends. Without those extra features, the soulgrinder totals to 21 images.

A giant infernal war machine manned by the pig demon Drakka, this boss fight has the player shooting at various pieces of the machine as it comes onto screen- starting with the rear of the vehicle and ending with the cockpit where Drakka steps atop it and fights back with barrages of bullets and swings with a chain.

When designing this boss, I did try and implement Drakka, however I realized during development that he was going to cause issues with the amount of time it would take to animate him and the vehicle. As a result, the aspect involving him was scrapped. If you want to envision him, just imagine him being inside the vehicle

a WIP on Drakke during development before I scrapped him.

Because of Drakka's removal, some of the grinder's kit had to be changed- gone would be the attacks using Drakka's chain and in would be something entirely different.

I did not code in any of the Soul Grinders attacks- that was done by Sage. He will hopefully discuss what he did with those attacks. I will however showcase the animations made

Attack 1: Bullet Spray

A relatively simple attack, the grinder opens its mouth and unleashes a barrage of consisting of 5 bullets per shot.

This attack is available by default

Attack 2: Missile Strike

This attack involve the soul grinder shoot a missile up into the air that explodes down into a rain of triangular bullets. The Missile can be destroyed prior to detonation, preventing the bullets from raining down. Players did not realize this. This attack is unlocked upon reaching 50% HP. The bullet was done by Sage, the missile was done by me.

Attack 3: Mega Laser

The last of the Soul Grinder's attacks, it charges up a powerful laser from its horns and fires it straight ahead. This move is unlocked during the last 25% of HP. I did not sprite the laser, that was done by Sage.

[isaachaworthgamesdesign]

Week 12c- Designing the Enemies, level 1

The following is

Flameskulls

A simple enemy that comes in 5 variants, each variant moves across the screen in a different manner. Red skulls flies in a straight line, green skulls flies in a wave pattern, yellow skulls flies in a spiral pattern and shoots at the player at fixed intervals, blue skulls move towards the player while remaining on the same Y level as them, and finally pink skulls starts slow and then accelerates as it flies in a straight line- firing bullets directly above and below itself as it does.

The flameskulls were a rather straightforward enemy throughout development, however there was a point where we couldn't quite the movement of some of them right. While Red, Blue, and Pink skulls were rather easy, the Green and Yellow skulls proved to be difficult with their unique methods of moving, that was until we found the Ellipse Movement plugin which smoothed out their movement.

Animationwise, the skulls were rather simple, consisting of simply 2 frames of animation for each of them.

Mausoleum

Large mobile graveyards that attack by spawning swarms of flameskulls in various arrangements.

These enemies are peculiar ones as they serve as spawners for other enemies. Originally, we had their spawning abilities simply be an additional timer where they caused more skulls to appear as per the normal spawning rules for the skulls, however we edited this to have the skulls appear from the mausoleum itself to better convey what it is doing.

When it came to the animations, the mausoleum totalled to four different frames of animation.

Tormentor

A larger, more formidable foe that hugs the right side of the screen and moves up and down slightly. It shoots at the player with a barrage of triple-shot bullets and occasionally launching homing missiles at the player that can be destroyed.

As mentioned in the game discussion, the tormentor's two attacks utilize the threat level mechanic- an effect inspired by DOTA 2's Pseudo Random Distribution. The missile attack and threat system was implemented by me- the rest of its kit was implemented by Sage.

The Tormentor is the first of the enemies to have a sizeable collection of animations, totalling to 14 different images if you include the 2 for the missiles.

Turret

“Stationary” enemies that shoot bullets at the player, locking onto the player’s position, they move across the screen but only across the ground and ceiling- this movement is done despite their stationary purpose to give off the illusion of the player moving past them.

The turret was the only enemy in the game that required 0 animations as its head rotates using game code rather than animations. Only the head can be damaged as its body serves as set dressing.

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Week 12b- Designing the Player, Erdan

Out of the characters, I did end up making all of Erdan unlike Peter. Erdan follows the archetype of character known colloquially as the "glass cannon"- a character with high offensive power but very low defences- His abilities deal incredible amounts of damage to large groups of enemies, but he only has one heart when compared to Peter's three hearts. What this means it only takes two bad hits to take out one of Erdan's lives.

LMB Ability- Splinter Blast

Erdan shoots forth a ball of lightning that splits into smaller balls of lightning after flying a set distance. These smaller balls deal less damage individually but more that the initial projectile if they all connect. The larger ball is the first of the projectiles that deals 10 damage on a hit. Once its x value is 250 units or greater away from the player, it will split into 5 of the smaller projectiles, each of which deal around 3 damage (totalling to 15 if they all connect)

RMB Ability- Lightning Strike

RMB calls forth a lightning strike that that occurs again two more times after short intervals

Shift Ability- Barrier

Shift deploys a small energy wall that moves slowly forward and blocks incoming enemy weak bullets for a short duration. The wall has a timed life of 5 seconds, deleting itself after the duration. Collision with the wall deals 5 damage to enemies, it travels a distance of around 100units a second and deletes any weak bullet that collides with it. This ability is Erdan's only tool to help mitigate incoming attacks.

Ultimate- Meteor Swarm

Ultimate Calls down a series of meteors from the sky in fixed locations on the screen that pierce enemies deal massive damage to enemies they come into contact with

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Week 12a- Designing the Player, Peter

Given my side of development, I will be discussing more of the spritework and animations rather than the programming. If you wish to learn more bout the coding of such things, you may have to look at their blogs going into detail on them.

With regards the Mouse, Lizard Frog discussion as described in Lecture 6, when compared to Erdan, Peter is designed to be an all-rounder and a beginner character- possessing tools and abilities that are reliable and not too flashy. He possess three times the health of Erdan with three hearts instead of simply one but he is a little slower and possesses less area of effect damage than Erdan.

LMB Ability- Gun

LMB has peter shoot a simple bullet from his rifle in a straight line, hitting the first enemy in its path.

this ability was implemented back during the original prototype

RMB Ability- Grenade

RMB has Peter launch a grenade from the underbarrel of his rifle, which proceeds to follow an arc as it travels. Upon contact with an enemy, the grenade explodes, destroying weak bullets and damaging nearby enemies.

The little sprite below is the grenade. In game it rotates around using a code. While I did not code in most of its aspects, I did add the rotation and added some ellipse movement using the ellipse movement plugin to given it an arcing motion.

Shift Ability- Smokescreen

Shift has Peter slip into shadows, gaining a boost in speed and becoming invulnerable for a short duration.

This ability was implemented fully by Sage, however I did be the one to suggest how to implement a variable to the player known as "Invulnerable" which primarily exists to track the effect of this ability.

Ultimate- Sharpshooter

Q has Peter fire a large, powerful blast from his rifle that pierces all enemies.

Originally, it was a projectile that travelled across the screen as a series of bullets, however once I designed the proper sprite for the shot, it effectively became a screen-wide laser.

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Week 11b- Game Discussions

Considering the game that we are working on, I thought it would be appropriate to cover the mechanics and inner workings of a game from the same genre as Hell Riders. For this, I will discuss a couple of games for different parts of Hell Rider's mechanics:

Ult Generation- Deltarune

As discussed in the MVP document, the player can generate . This idea of building up powerful actions was inspired by a similar mechanic in the RPG Deltarune by Toby Fox. In this game, the player defends against attacks in quick bullet-hell minigames by controlling their soul to avoid incoming bullets. Unlike its predecessor Undertale however, there is an additional mechanic in the form of the Tension meter. This meter builds up Tension Points (TP for short) whenever the player narrowly dodges bullets in these bullet hell sections. Once the meter is filled up enough, the player can unleash stronger attacks and abilities

Image From: Tim Ronan, 2019 https://www.keengamer.com/articles/previews/deltarune-preview/

Showing this narrow dodge, the player briefly gets a flash/outline appear next to the character as they move around to signify their close escape with damage.

*Note: Image above was added later in development than week 11

In Hell Riders, we will have a similar system for narrowly dodging attacks. As shown with the image above, the player flashes a white outline whenever they narrowly avoid an enemy.

Pseudo Random Distribution- Dota 2

Taking a break about talking about bullets, I should discuss a little about how some of the more complicated enemies work.

Take the Tormentor. In the game it has two different attacks- one attack where it fires a barrage a bullets at the player, and another where they fire homing rockets. In a more simple setup, the designer would have the enemy either alternate between the two in a fixed pattern or have them randomly pick one from the other with a dice roll. Now the game does use random distribution, but it does so with a little twist I picked up from my thousands of hours playing DOTA 2 with Pseudo Random Distribution.

DOTA 2 is a MOBA where players take control of heroes with unique sets of abilities and work together to destroy the enemy team's "Ancient". Some of its heroes and items possess abilities that have a random chance of hitting. However a good chunk of those abilities don't have truly random effects as to add a level of consistency to them and make them more competitively viable. To do this, they have a system where whenever the ability fails to activate on a roll, the chance of activating it on the next roll increases and continues to do so until it is successfully rolled- whereupon it resets.

Here is an example taken from the game (Liquipedia, 2025 https://liquipedia.net/dota2/Random_Distribution) the item Skull Basher's Bash has a 25% chance to stun the target as a melee hero. On the first attack, however, it only has an ~8.5% probability to bash. Each subsequent attack without a bash increases the probability by ~8.5%. So on the second attack, the chance is ~17%, on the third it is ~25.5%, etc. After a bash occurs, the probability resets to ~8.5% for the next attack. These probabilities average out so that, over a moderate period of time, Bash effect procs nearly 25% of the time.

Back to Hell Riders, I have implemented a simpler version of the system with a variable I call Threat. Back to the Tormentor and shown above, when they roll for attacks, they roll 1d6 (or choose a random number between 0 and 5). To activate the missile attack, it must roll a 7 (6 in the code) or higher, which is statistically impossible for it to do with a standard system. In this system however, whever it does not roll for missiles, the enemy increases its threat value by 1, adding its threat value to the number rolled and allowing to now potentially roll a 7 or higher. This continues until it finally performs this attack, whereupon its threat value resets to 0 and the process starts all over again.

Bullet Hell Hitboxes- Tohou

When designing a bullet hell game, it is good to look at what works with some of the most successful ones in the genre. Which is where I will briefly discuss the Tohou series. Compared to Hell Riders, the Tohou games possesses a lot more happening on the screen- simply because this game really does bring the hell in bullet hell.

Here's a fun game, find the player in the picture above^ (Jaimers, 2016, screenshot from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AY7QEEnSGVU)

It is important to note that the player in the image above has not taken damage despite how it may look with the bullets all over them. The reason to why is rather simple- their collision is extremely small.

Image: Tohou Wiki, 2023 https://en.touhouwiki.net/wiki/File:CharacterHitboxSizes.png

Looking at the image above, you can see the sprite of the player and the sprite of their actual hitbox shown by the coloured box on them, what this allows is for the player to navigate those extremely busy screens without a single hit- giving the player sense of overcoming seemingly insurmountable odds with not even a scratch.

The player's hitbox is so small that it is even a meme that fluctuates around the game's community, commenting on how Tohou players could dodge that

With regards to Hell Riders, I had to implement this to get have a similar feel exist. While I do not have the hit box as small, it is still smaller than the size of the sprite. The outer boxes being the collision to award the player with ult charge and the maller boxe being their actual hit box for receiving damage .

Additionally, just like in Deltarune, narrowly dodging bullets in Tohou games awards the player with additional points the game calls "grazes".

[isaachaworthgamesdesign]

Week 11a- Hell Riders Playtesting

Today marks the first playtester playing the game

Here are their comments:

They like the character design

Up/Down Movement was less responsive than left/right

Flame skull bullets could be bigger

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Week 10b- Group Formation and Assignment 3 Team Discussion

Meet the Team!

With the team established, I feel like it would be a good idea to introduce everyone to you lot

Sage

Primary programmer, Sage's job will be coding practically most of the enemies and mechanics into the game.

Mazhar

Mahzar's job is one of the most important ones as he manages the material that is handed to playtesters- this includes managing the survey, gathering data from this survey, and being the primary individual that communicates with testers.

Nishant

secondary artist and programmer, Nishant's role in the team is to produce the background pieces for each of the games's levels and help out wherever possible with programming or spriting.

Me!

Lead director and artist for the game, my job is to make sure everything is running according to the MVP and make everything look good when I do so.

[isaachaworthgamesdesign]

Week 10a- Assignment 3 Development Progress

Deciding on Project

out of the three projects I have already created, I did weigh my considerations between each of them:

Astro Miner is a rather straightforward puzzle platformer with cute designs, but is one that could be challenging to design levels for

King of the Seas is the most simple game here, but admittedly the project I spent the least amount of time on so that one is out of the debate

Hell Riders was already the one I was making the Onepage and Onesheet for and was the one I was the most passionate about. At this point in the unit, it was the game I had put in the most work into building. The only issue was that it was the most ambitious of the projects I had built here...

In the end, I decided to go big or go home and chose Hell Riders

The Candidates

But of course, this is a group assignment, so I will take some time to mention the other candidates for the group work, besides my own. For each of them we then weighed up the advantages and disadvantages of each game, which will be listed below (or at least my takes on each game):

Option 1: It's a Bit Sharp

Pros:

Interesting design for the game, the player being what they are is quite fresh,

Player controls are simple and straight forward- simple move and jump,

unique character design

Cons:

Simplicity of controls/lack of actions could lead to repetitive game,

Physics-based mechanics may be difficult to get right,

Level design may be difficult, given the player’s simple moveset and possible limitless speed- levels will need to be designed to accommodate both kinds of players which will be more work (both the players who really use the high speeds the game can give them and those that are not as skilled)

Option 2: Echo's Leap

Pros

Unique art style with the hand-drawn approach,

Cosmetics for players,

Very simple and friendly game

Cons

Relatively Vague on how various mechanics work,

Simplicity of controls/lack of actions could lead to repetitive gameplay loop,

given that levels are sprawling, explorable, nonlinear areas with branching paths- designing levels may become difficult with conveying the end goal to the player or directing them to where they need to go while still rewarding players to go off the beaten path

Option 3: Steel is Stronger Than the Flesh

Pros

Great Art/designs,

The setting of a 40K styled platformer is definitely something unique,

Nice and simple story

Cons

Puzzles and minigames may be difficult to implement depending on complexity and could clash with the rest of the game,

upgrades that offer potentially significant abilities like double jumping being locked behind shops that you only gain currency from random drops could lead to troubles in level design,

Most enemies look a bit samey and seem to have very similar methods of attack, which could get repetitive for players

And of course, my own game- Hell Riders

the following pros and cons are those stated by the rest of the team

Pros:

a complex and interesting gameplay with a lot of things to keep the game interesting and fun,

Seems to be well throughout and we’ll plan making it easier to make,

Great character designs

Cons:

seems like a lot going on and it could have a lot things that could be streamlined,

may have some balancing issues as there are a lot of characters one might end up better than the other characters,

Seems like it could have a lot on the screen at one time so could lead to some issues with running the game

Final Verdict

After some voting and weighing up the pros and cons of each project, we eventually decided that my project- Hell Riders, will be the one we work on for the assessment.

As I have mentioned earlier, this is perhaps the most ambitious of the games here. If things go wrong in development or we fail to meet the expectations of the MVP, we can reflect on the ambition of the project and how we have come to learn what can and cannot be done within the time frame.

[isaachaworthgamesdesign]

Week 9b- Assignment 2 Progress

With a week of work on this assessment, it was time to pitch everyone in on how the onesheet and onepage are going.

Onpage/Mockup

After a bit more spriting, this was what I ended up for a mockup image for Hell Riders including spring up another enemy for the game- the tormentor. It did not actually exist in the game as of yet and simply was a sprite that existed for this mockup.

From there, it was transformed into the following:'

Onesheet

As for the onesheet, this is how its going:

As you can see, there is a lot more present now in this image with all four characters drawn up for it. Then with the remaining details it comes to this

All in all, I am pretty happy on how it ended out.

[isaachaworthgamesdesign]

Week 9a- Racing Post Mortem

By the beginning of this week, it was time to put Hell Riders on the same postmortem process like the other games made for this assignment. Like the others, this was the final product I had made by the postmortem date.

Compared to the development post, I did make quite a bit of progress, cleaning up Peter's sprite, implementing the HUD I designed for the Onepage mockup (for the most part), adding funcitoning Health Bars for both the player and enemy and most importantly, I implemented the main menu of the game following a tutorial I found online covering this topic.

What went well?

I am very happy with what I was able to get in within this amount of time.

What went wrong?

When it comes to what went wrong. I will admit the player can die pretty quickly as i-frames aren't working the absolute best

What would I do differently

If I was to do anything differently, I guess it would be to work on something less insane or ambitious.