(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.

Analysis of Work (2nd Project)

Analysis of Work

On this project, I have not done as much work as I could have done within the last 12 weeks of work as there hasn’t been a significant improvement over the mistakes I’ve made last project.

Unlike the last project, I had forgotten to make regular blog updates but I have at least saved my documents, ideas and research in word format, ready to be imported into blogger.

As for my actual work, there has been a noticeable improvement as the ideas I’ve had for this project were reasonable to make within the time frame given and there are even more sources for me to get ideas from such as the Road Safety app. From the drag and drop mechanic from the seatbelt mini-game to the how success’ and failures were presented in the drunk driving part.

I feel most proud of my final product of the game because to date, I have put the most amount of effort into it despite the fact it still has various flaws and bugs (such as the disappearing characters and score displaying incorrectly along with the driver’s seat being on the left side, a huge oversight) which I didn’t have time to fully iron out without breaking something else.

I had also made good use of the assets provided from the original app to help simulate how my own mini-game would fit into the app, using the mascot, the fonts and the graphics for the lives and start/game over screens.

Improvements that need to be made are: to do the research segment of future projects better, make sure there is enough time to iron out any common/uncommon bugs or problems in the game to make it more polished and always triple check through work or ask someone else to check it.