Swarm

Inspiration

My original plan was to create a top-down dungeon crawler where you kill mobs in certain rooms to get upgrades. I got my inspiration from top-down mob-killing games like Hades and dungeon crawlers like Zelda. One of my main inspirations was the mobile game Archero.

What it does

It's a top-down shooter set in space in which you use your mouse to both aim and shoot. You have to either dodge enemies or shoot them before they get to you. The gun fires as fast as you can click, but ammo is very limited so you have to conserve it as best you can. There is also a variety of enemies which have different pathfinding which makes it even harder to aim well and conserve ammo.

How we built it

I used Unity and C# for all the programming as well as Piskley to draw sprites and FL Studio to make music. I started out trying to make a dungeon crawler but the movement system I made seemed to fit a zero-gravity setting a lot better, so I decided to change it so space.

Challenges we ran into

It was pretty much my first time using Unity or C# so I had a lot of problems early on with very basic functions and a lot of watching Brackeys tutorials. The other main challenge that I ran into was making the game as balanced as possible. A lot of times there would be too many spawns and you would die within a second, and other times you could just stay in the middle and shoot. Also, the spawn rates of certain enemies were hard to balance. With some settings, it would lead to there only being the hard-to-hit enemies on screen at the end, while with others I wouldn't see any.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I am proud that I was even able to learn a new language and create a functional game in just a few days. I also really liked the finished product, specifically the movement mechanics.

What we learned

I learned so much about how Unity works, which is a language completely different than any other I've used before. I definitely know a lot more about references and objects than I did a few days ago. Also, this is really my first time making a fully finished game with sound effects, custom sprites, and background music, so I learned a lot about the non-programming side of game development.

What's next for Swarm

There are still a couple of features that I would like to add. First a larger variety of enemies with different weapons like guns, boomerangs, lasers, axes, etc. I also think going back to my original idea to create a level-based game with upgrades and powerups would also suit the mechanics well.

Built With

• unity