(FMP) Weekly Progress Updates

Week 1: ending 20th March

Quiet week, researched into the bullet hell games and shooters in general, analysing their mechanics and how they play. Examples of the games I looked at include Touhou Project, Realm of the Mad God and Asteroids.

Currently up to date with my plan.

Week 2: ending 27th March

Research was concluded after I had looked up on potential themes I could use with my art direction and settled for the medieval fantasy. Decided to come up with ideas first based on what I have gathered before creating the base game that only consist of the character that can shoot when the X key is pressed and an enemy that continuously shoots a bullet every second. I also chose the arrow keys over the WASD keys to 

Currently up to date.

I also got the boss some fairly complicated movements as well by using different variables and walls to create this limited random AI.

Week 3: ending 17th April

Created a majority of my assets including tiles that will spawn together to create an endless moving background, the character is created as a flying wizard whilst the boss is a wizard as well except he's flying on a nimbus cloud and my final choice after looking through my other flying platform ideas.

Half of my current planned assets done and still up to date with my plan.

This blue robed wizard is the player character. I have his whole body lying forward with his arms behind all with a drop shadow below to show that they're flying and above ground.

These next two images make up the boss character. I had considered the boss to be in a similar pose to the player character but decided against it since it would look weird for the boss to fly in that pose so I decided that he'll be standing upright, however, even in that pose something was missing which was that he seemed like he was on the ground, so I came up with flying platforms for the boss after looking at fantasy floating islands and magic circles and finally ended with a nimbus cloud as the final platform due to how menacing on can be and that clouds are objects that naturally float in the sky.

These four images are some examples of my moving background assets that will tile together and will loop randomly between each one so it adds to the feeling of the characters moving.

Week 4: ending 24th April

Finished with the last set of assets, bullets, power ups, etc.

Green bullets represent boss bullets with the big orb with rings being additional armaments for the boss to shoot extra bullets, red bullets represent player bullets as well as the star being his homing shots, the meteor is the bomb icon or what clears the bullets on screen.
Also up to date this week.

Enemy Bullet

Player Bullet

Both the player character's main bullets are the same shape but different with colour differences to distinguish the two apart.

Bomb Icon

I had the decision to use either and actual black round bomb as the icon for clearing every on screen bullet or I'd use a meteor icon. I chose the meteor icon because it fit the wizard theme more than the bomb did, although a bomb would definitely be better than the meteor if my player character was an archer or a rouge instead.

Boss Orb

I chose to give the boss this armament as to increase the spread of the bullets over a wider area instead of limiting the shot direction from the boss itself.

Player Homing Bullet

The star was my design choice for homing bullets because of how ninjas accurately throw their shurikens at their opponents and because they're shaped similarly to pointed stars, I felt it was appropriate to use compared to vector drawn thunderbolts.

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Homing Powerup

Bullet Powerup

For this power up and the basic one, the final choice I made for them was to put them into boxes so they can be distinguished differently than the actual bullets on screen.

Life Icon

I chose the standard heart icon for lives as for a game like this where the character can get defeated in 1 shot, an icon to represent the lives would definitely be better than a health bar.

Week 5: ending 1st May

Started creating the game from the base I have created the extra components for the player character such as the homing bullets. I also  HUD. The HUD itself doesn't have a fancy layout as the focus for me was to get the game working along with my assets.

Here we have the icons for the bombs, lives, power-ups and both the regular score and survival score.

The regular score and survival score are both get a point every second but the regular score is also influenced by hits on the boss (+1 Point) and power-up pickups (+100 points).

Here is the event sheet for the bombs. The bombs and lives work similar to each other but the lives trigger upon the player character hit box getting hit and the bombs activate on the press of a button.

I have also gotten the basic shots to work, as well as giving a homing behaviour to another set.

Fairly easy to do except figuring out how to create the homing behaviour, but after looking at various tutorials, I figured something out and managed to complete what I've stated in my plan for this week.

Week 6: ending 8th May

I got the background assets to tile and move from right to left as well as getting them to spawn randomly. I had difficulty trying to sort out a bug where two of the background assets overlap with each other.

As for the power-up drops, I had figured out a way for them to spawn at different damage intervals but at the moment there is a bug where it occasionally spawns 10 or so in one instance but otherwise, the intervals vary on the damage dealt to the boss and state of the player character.

Somewhat up to date at this point but however,  there are still these bugs with these mechanics so I'll need to clear them near the end if I have time since luckily they aren't game breaking.

Week 7: ending 15th May

I had lost half of the game over the weekend due to carelessness with my memory stick but I've managed to rebuild it fairly quickly since I had backups to the assets and screenshots of my previous builds.

Unfortunately due to this I'll be limited in what I can do due to the nearing deadline so no extras can be added but I've at least cleared a few of the bugs, but the power-up drop bug still occurs but less frequently. Also because of this, I'm behind my plan and will need to sort out parts of my game through the evaluation week.

The problem with the background overlap was because my randomiser was an instance variable that targeted a family but, when I changed it to a local variable, I managed to prevent it from occurring again.

All in all I added a game over screen displaying how long you've survived in seconds and the overall score. If I had more time, I would've also added a table of the top 10 scores.

Week 8: ending 22nd May

Evaluation week. For now I have done the overall work evaluation on what I have done and finished but I'll still get to work on what I'm missing or what I need to add to my existing work from my teacher's formative assessment which would be the: game, some ideas, final ideas and product evaluation.

Overall however, I'm somewhat worried about my work looking back through the previous weeks due to bugs and losing half of my game due to carelessness, however though from making the assets to the sheer amount of commands put into construct, this is still the best amount of work I've done for a game.
In the future I may redo this game mostly from scratch and make it a better game than this version of my finished product.

(FMP) Weekly Plan

Week 1:

Research into Bullet Hell games and Shooters in general and analyse their mechanics. Grab a few of those games and play them instead of just reading up or watching videos of them.

Week 2:

Research into potential themes I could use for my art direction and start coming up with ideas. Afterwards, use Construct 2 to start creating the base for my game including character movement and enemy movement.

Week 3:

Start creating the assets for the game using Photoshop. Try to focus on the characters and one of the backgrounds. Any extras can come nearer the end of the project.

Week 4:

Finish up the asset making by creating the miscellaneous pieces such as the bullets, power ups, HUD parts etc.

Week 5:

Using the base, start making the game by creating the events needed for the player character and the HUD icons.

Week 6:

Continue making the game, creating any additional assets if they're required. Focus enemy character(s) and figuring out how to create a moving background. Consider how power-up drops are going to be handled or if they're lingering on the stage.

Week 7:

Finish the final touches on the game and stamp out any bugs that are present. Any extras that can be added such as additional backgrounds and assets. Potentially clean up any existing artwork so the final game looks cleaner.

Week 8 (Evaluation Week):

Evaluate all the work done throughout the project as well as the final product as well.

If there is still missing work or the final product isn't finished then use the extra week afterwards and be sure to finish.

(FMP) Plan

Section 1: Project Brief

My project will be on making a bullet hell game related to the atmospheric style project done a long time ago. I feel that a shmup genre would be great for making an climatic game and it would be a opportune moment to learn how to make particle effects and multiple bullet behaviours, as well as finding ways to keep lag to a minimum when there are a multitude of objects on the screen.

Section 2: Influences, Research, Sources and Ideas

Influences include bullet hell games such as the Touhou and Gundemonium series of shmups, as well as being some of my research sources.

There are also some general shooters that I'll look into for inspiration on bullet patterns, for a potential art or thematic direction and judging how difficult my game will be.

Section 3: Techniques, Processes and Timetables

I plan to us Photoshop to create the art assets and object animations whilst Construct 2 will be used to develop the game and how it works.

As for my plan:

The first week shall be used to conduct my research, the second to develop a base design for the game to figure out what mechanics I'm going to use, weeks 3 - 4 will be used to create the game's assets, 5 - 7 to start properly making the game on construct with the final week to be used for evaluation.

Section 4: Method of Evaluation

I plan to make weekly updates to my blog on how my work is progressing (unless I forget, then I shall at least write my progress on a word document) and if I am working properly towards the deadline. To determine if my game is successful or not, I will get other people to alpha/beta test the end product and get their critique for me to infer.

(FMP) Shooter Research

Shooting game research

Notebook Wars has the art style of being sketched up on a notepad and uses pencil colours to further emphasise the rough texture. The shadows for the aerial objects help show those objects as flat paper cutouts.

Features upgrades, a multitude of levels, a fair amount of grinding for money.

I could adopt the flat paper cutout as a the artstyle for my game as well as potential enemy types and bullet distribution per stage.

Realm of the Mad God uses and 8-bit pixel style art with a fantasy setting, invoking the feeling of playing the old retro shooters of the past but using 3D elements as well.

This is a well done MMO, rougelike, bullet hell game blending the elements of precision dodging, insane shooting, permanent death strengthening characters and co-operatively working with other players.

I can take this concept and create a topdown PvE arena shooter and also the ideas on what bullet types I could use from spread to homing.

Asteroids uses simple white outlines to represent the irregular shaped asteroids, triangular ship and the flying saucers, all on top of a black background to simply emphasise the game’s setting in space. The goal of the game is to get as many points as possible by destroying the asteroids before losing all your lives.

StormWinds uses a steampunk theme for the weapons and aircrafts inducing the feel of an old mechanised war.

The dark colour palette emphasises the grittiness of machines and the conflict between the defenders and the attacking forces.

This tower defence aspect is interesting in that it’s different from your standard top down view with enemy units following a set path whilst this one has you manually control the turrets and the forces are invading from the right side of the screen in an attempt to destroy your turrets and get past.

(FMP) Bullet Hell Games Research

Bullet Hell Research

Touhou Project (東方Project) is a series of 2D vertical scrolling curtain-fire shooting game, featuring a variety of complex enemy and boss bullet patterns, which can be seemingly artistic, power-ups to help deal more damage, bombs to clear the on-screen bullets and a unique death bomb mechanic in which you spend 2 bombs within a extremely small frame to avoid losing a life.

Mushihime-sama is a bullet hell shooter which has 2 kinds of player shot types, normal (easy to manoeuvre) and abnormal (a technical shot type that requires learning it’s mechanics to use efficiently).

Like a majority of bullet hell games, Mushihime-sama has bombs to help clear on-screen enemy bullets, though getting hit whilst having 3 or more bombs results in a bomb being activated upon getting hit while using up those 3 bombs.

Gundemonium Recollection and GundeadliGne (the first two games of the Gundemonium Collection) are horizontal scrolling shmups, which have the features of being able to switch between shooting left or right, holding down the shot button for focused fire and being able to slow down incoming barrages of bullets.

Gradius is a horizontal shoot’em up series in which you battle waves of enemies through multiple environments. When you first start the game, the ship starts off weak but can become stronger and faster by attaining a power-up item and allocating it to your desired stat during the level.

DonPachi is a vertical scrolling shmup has the player select one of 3 fighters (A: Narrow stream shots, B: Forward facing shots with 2 90 degree from the front guns, C: Wide 3 way spread shot.) and fights over 5 areas, using 2 modes of fire: tapping (normal shots) and holding (Concentrated vertical beam (laser)) the fire button. Like there are 2 kinds of firing, there are 2 types of bombs: Spread (normal bomb type) and Laser (More powerful, narrow angle and recoil).

Final Product Evaluation (2nd Project)

Final Product Evaluation

The demographic I was planning to aim this mini-game for were young drivers around age 18-24 and raising awareness to an aspect of road safety, with mine being about designated drivers.

I feel that my final product would have got the message across, as the assets provided and research done had helped me to come up with a tip for how important a designated driver is after have a drink out with your mates or colleagues so you can safely arrive home, as well as coming up with the idea of sorting out who goes where in the car.

In contrast however, there wasn’t much ‘movement’ in the game to help convey the danger of getting one of your drunken mates in the driver’s seat, and there is little variation in the scenario set in the mini-game that it may end up being like a chore to some of the demographic instead of being informative and come out as unappealing.

If I had more time to work on my mini-game, I would have added animations to the car by having it drive safely if the designated driver was in the driver’s seat or crash if otherwise, have the driver’s seat on the right side rather than the left and include the random variable of the characters appearing in different starting positions each round for added variety.