Bullet Ballet

Project INFO

Level-Ups

My Design Goals

Gameplay Design

With this project being heavily inspired in “Crawl”, I wanted a similar gameplay experience where both players are in constant tension, interacting with each other but with fundamentally different mechanics at any given moment. Not only that, but I wanted to retain the aspect of constantly changing goals within a single game experience and having to have different strategies for both positions in order to win.
This brought me to designing two different positions, one defensive and one offensive with very clear goals: kill and survive. Those would then be swapped depending solely on your proficiency on them. Not only that, but I decided to create a space where you only need to master one of the positions to win so that new players could focus on just mastering the position they like the best.

Controller Design

When designing the controls of the game, I decided to make it as natural as I could.

-Survivor

When designing the controls for the survivor, I wanted movement on the left stick as most games do and his shield on the right stick instead of the letter buttons since it is the thing that he needs to “aim” and players have pre-constructed knowledge of using the right stick as aiming. The only thing I regret not doing is putting the survivor’s dash on the right trigger rather than the right bumper to make it more similar to the turret’s player controls. But that was what I needed to do since I was pressed on time and it was already built as the survivor originally was going to have a projectile mechanic.

-Turret

Most of the turret's controls follow the same thought process as the survivor’s, the only difference comes with the affordance of changing controls between turrets. For that, I originally envisioned using the D-Pad as it makes it very clear that you press the right arrow to use the right turret, the top arrow for the top turret, and so forth so on. However, I came to realize three main things. The first tone is that using the D-pad, forces the player of moving their thumb away from the left stick, the second is that the D-pad doesn’t have great feedback or precision, and the third is that players are not accustomed to using the D-pad for meaningful mechanics, those are usually extra buttons in most games. This lead me to look for new potentials and to realize that the letter buttons had all the pros the D-pad has without any of the cons that I just listed. Not only that, but they allowed me to color code my turrets for better signifiers and create signifiers that are more readable as well. And so it became obvious to me that I should use those instead.

Tutorial

As this is a party game without a story mode, I had to figure out how to teach players how to play the game. For that, I decided that I didn’t want a big amount f images and text panels before the beginning of each game and that I would rather have a tutorial screen where the player could easily pick to learn how to play with either role separably or learn about the overall gameplay rules. For that, I created two spaces where the player gets to learn and practice the mechanics with a very minimal amount of UI and text. And for explaining the game mode some text was mandatory, but I tried to exemplify as much of the text as possible with simple animations so that I could cut down on reading and make it more understandable at the same time.