Bullet Bots Mayhem

The Concept

The core concept of this game is that it is a fighting game where every enemy defeat gives you a chance to upgrade your own stats. There is no healing, no leveling up; a player can only become stronger by defeating stronger enemies, and claiming those stats as their own. The challenge is that the enemies can do this, too. If defeated, a players own stats are up for the taking, allowing enemies to steal the players stats and replace them with their own. Thus, players are encouraged to strategize which enemies they go after, and where (and when!) they die.

Inspiration

I'm a graduate student at Simmons, with a degree in Information Technology and studying Library and Information Science... but I've always loved gaming, and started my college career in a game design major. Last semester, I spent some time learning Unity and C# for an independent study course, and though it was a lot of work, and struggle, it was also really fun when I managed to figure out how to get things to work.

The concept for this game itself came to be quite randomly while laying in bed--but it reminds me a lot of Feeding Frenzy and agar.io which may have been subconscious inspirations.

What it does

So far, it's just a concept and a mechanical demo. It's hard to build a whole game in a weekend, especially if you've got work and school going on. But I'm quite proud of the functionality it does currently have:

• Player movement
• Enemy movement (enemies will chase the player if the player is close enough)
• Bullet firing/combat
• Death triggers
• Stat transmission (using star objects dropped on death)
• Enemy spawning

How we built it

I used a concept map (available on Github) to plan out the steps I needed to take with my code, and then implemented it step by step. I began with creating movement, moving the player and having enemies follow, and then added the shooter elements. These were necessary before I could begin working on the key concept mechanics.

Challenges we ran into

I'm still very much learning how to make games, and so I spent a lot of this project searching the web for information and looking at other people's work to figure out solutions for my own problems. A big issue was determining how to set the direction a player or enemy is facing, to ensure bullets fire in the proper direction; both objects needed different scripts to achieve this. Additionally, though it's not implemented, mapping out how the game itself would proceed--when are enemies spawned? with what stats? where?--was a challenge that, unfortunately, can't be answered so simply. A game would really need playtesting to finalize those sorts of mechanics.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Making something that runs and is playable, even if it's not very fun yet, is achievement enough!

What's next for Bullet Bots Mayhem

The next step in the game is to add some passive enemy movement--right now, enemies only move if the player is within a certain distance--and, perhaps, to have the enemies fight each other. Enemy spawning would be another step. I'll need to spend some time coming up with a complex series of if statements to determine the nature of what enemies are spawned and when to give the game more flair.

Built With

• c#
• unity