Team size: 1
Roles: Level Designer, Gameplay Programmer, Game Designer
Itch page: https://madelinevisconte.itch.io/blastnsmash
This is a small solo Unity engine game developed by myself. The core concept of the game is the idea that you can propel yourself around with a shotgun which makes for a very unique and interesting way to create levels.
The core gameplay mechanics of this game are propelling yourself around, hitting enemies with a hammer, and throwing shuriken at specific enemies. The reason I designed it like this is so the player will enter a rotation of using these different mechanics in order to get to the end of the level as fast as possible with the highest score as possible.
A majority of how the game functions is using the physics system of the Unity engine. The player has a rigidbody that whenever there is input, it will apply a force to that rigidbody. This is to make it so the speed of the game is still fast but allows for consistent and solid hit detection on colliders.
Given the range of movement that the player has at their disposal, it made a very specific challenge for level design. I had to make sure that they were designed in such a way to make it so the player could not instantly propel themselves to the end which made for many remakes of levels and many playtesting sessions.
Certain parts of the gameplay proved to be fairly difficult to implement at first. This sample of code is just to make a slight movement to the shotgun depending on how fast you are going. This may be a small piece that is not necessarily needed but it added to the feel of the game and made the player feel much faster.
Here is an example of the physics aspect of the game. The player has a rigidbody that is controlled by applying different forces via gameplay elements. One of these gameplay elements is the gun that the player possesses. When the player fires this gun it pushes the character backwards from whatever direction the camera is positioned.
The UI is something that needed to be fast and responsive to whatever the player needs to know at the time. This code example shows how the health and dashes are handled by the UI manager in order for the player to be aware of what they have at a given time.
