Design of role-playing shooter
How I designed a top-down, role-playing, shooter game in 9 days for GDevelop Game Jam 5
Play on Itch.io ↗
Summary
Statement of purpose
A game where you’ll roleplay a ship captain, who saves their business by defeating pirates and delivering pies.
Sentiments felt while playing
Core loop: What keeps the game progressing
Our team
Common activities: Story and music selection
Creating a compelling story
Creating a ‘why’ to the entire game and setting the context
Story:
Pie-Rates, a multi-national corporation has taken control of your waters. They plan to shut your small pie delivery business. Even if today is the worse weather, you must deliver your pies and defeat the Pie-Rates! As per your deal, they’ll leave your waters, if you defeat them.
Journey map for player
What emotional journey would the player undergo?
The emotional journey the player should go in each section of the map
Vector graphics and bright colours
Overall creating a simple and focused feeling to the game
Choice of graphics: To create simple and scalable shapes (from Kenney)
Ship graphics and font used in the game
Experience to make player feel proud!
Using narrative, visuals and speed
Based on the vision, the player should feel proud while playing this game.
Narratives, dialogues, visuals and music was used to create this feeling.
Elements that added to make the experience of pride while playing the game
The player must deliver pies in unstable weather. This creates a sense of purpose and pride
Making game replayable using classes
How I designed a balanced class system to bring the player back to game
Replayability: The selection screen provided different classes with varying abilities.
Balancing using Radar chart: This helped to visualize the balance of classes across the parameters
Map design to make the gameplay fast and fun
Several map concepts were created and then the final map was created in Tiled
Map concepts: Sketches of map to visualize the path the player would take and locations of enemy
Visualizing and finalizing the map: At high level, I quickly laid out various map areas and created blocks for scaling them
Creating the map in Tiled
Creating a consistent look : In Tiled, I used Automapping for creating rules
Creating mini-boss fights for engaging gameplay
Mini-bosses were introduced at the end of each level
To break the monotony and keep the game exciting, mini-bosses were introduced.
They were fine-tuned to maintain the correct “flow” of the game.
Mini-bosses : Examples of two mini-bosses. A castle and a large galleon.
Choosing sounds and music
Fitting the music to mood and spirit of the game
Going with the theme, energetic, fast and inspiring game music was chosen from OpenGameArt.
Main theme : This music went well with the pace of the game and is played in the background.
Boss theme : Played during the boss battle, it’s intense tone went well with visuals.
Remixing the assets to create enemies
Enemy ships were cleverly created by picking assets from different sets
Creating enemies : Several assets from other asset packs were mixed to create variety of enemies.
Designing Enemy’s 2-stage AI
To break the enemy behaviour monotony and introduce ‘realistic’ behaviour, 2-stage AI was designed
2-stage AI : Enemies behave aggressively as the player moves closer
Luck element: Wheel-of-fortune
To balance the economy and introduce luck element, wheel-of-fortune was introduced
Wheel-of-fortune lets the players spend some of their coins to earn more coins.
Upgrading your ship
The core loop of upgrading was implemented using upgrade shop
developing the game in gdevelop
The game was built in GDevelop
Code sample: Sample for AI of turrets to shoot when ship is within range
Play testing
The game was launched on Itch.io and playtest feedback was gathered
Mobile playtest: Game was playtested on mobile browser and laptop browsers
Feedback from Itch.io: Some of the comments pointing towards improving controls
Updated gameplay: Several items were fixed such as WASD + mouse controls and front firing
Result
We participated in the game-jam and secured 73rd ranking out of 305 entries
