FUSE BOts

Project INFO

Level-Ups

My Design Process

Getting Started

As the Game Jam started, I made a point that everyone needed to be present for the first meeting. This is important to build motivation with the team, especially for our artist and sound design. Since there wouldn’t be time to change directions, I felt it was extremely important for them to participate in the conceptualization so that they felt creatively connected to the project. Originally we had planned 2 hours to come up with a concept. However, after that period we weren’t happy with our idea. So I made the decision to let everyone go for an hour so people could think things through and start prototyping to some sort. An hour later we came back and we switched gear completely as we found our concept!

Concept

Our idea came from thinking of Megazords and how they “Join Together” and so that’s what we ran with. I came up with the idea of a coop game where one player shoots and the other gathers the ammo off defeated enemies. However, I didn’t feel like that was enough, I wanted players to truly need to “Join Together” as if in a symbiotic relationship, and so I decided that players would need to also Join Together to share ammo and health besides just shooting a powerful gun.

Scope

We knew we wouldn’t have time for outlandish work so we settled with three super basic mechanics in our bullet hell game: Shooting, Gathering, and Joining together (for a powerful shot). HOwever, I quickly came to the realization that the gathering bot would be either boring or hard to play as they got into too much risk. Therefore I decided to add a “dodge” mechanic so they’d be more willing to face risks.

Going along with that we made 3 different enemies, one that runs towards you, one that is static and shoots forward, and one that shoots in 3 directions and moves sideways. This was definitely enough to make a simple yet interesting game in 2 days.