Herman Pettersson

Tribulation

A Vampire Survivors inspired Boomer-shooter with 3 enemy types & a boss fight.

Project & Design lead.

Game Loop

The very simple game loop that we wanted to implement. It was a project with 3 programmers but it also required heavy programming, so we limited movement options and kept the level very easy, opting for a circular and flat arena.

Enemy Size Visualization

A representation of the enemy heights and form taken into consideration when making our enemies. We wanted large hordes of enemies while also making them distinct and easy to see in a first-person perspective.

Enemy behavior design

The Villager, the most basic enemy in the game. A lanky farmer that simply runs at the player with a pitchfork in hand.

The Priest are meant to force the player to keep moving even more so than the rampaging villagers do by casting spells that follow the player for a couple of seconds until they explode.

The Cherub is our third and final normal enemy of the game. The plan was to start off grounded and make the enemies more fantastical and religious in nature as the game progressed, and we liked the idea of flying enemies.My original plan was to have a swarm behavior to the Cherubs that would prioritize staying close to other Cherubs over attacking the player, but we didn't have the time to implement such behavior.Original Cherub behavior:

The simplified Cherub behavior used in the game:

The Biblically Accurate Angel is the final challenge of the game. I was very ambitious in my ideas for it, with multiple attack patterns and multiple phases.Here are some of the scrapped ideas I had for attack patterns:

Finalized Attack Pattern

The above attack pattern is the one we implemented. Thanks to one of our programmers, it could easily be changed to make different attack patterns. Thanks to that, I got my wish of having multiple phases. We also reused the Cherub attack, with higher projectile speed and better tracking to put more pressure on the player.I also balanced the enemy waves, thanks to one of our programmers who created a easily changed system for me. The balancing also included making enemy variants with changed stats.

Player Abilities

When it comes to the upgrade system for the player, I was very inspired by a game called Soulstone Survivors. It gives the player a chance to choose between passives that increase the effectiveness of all abilities, or a stronger effect for a specific ability. I really liked that idea because it can give good build variety and it's a good system to continue building on.

There were of course a lot more ideas that we didn't have time to implement when it comes to the passives, but most of these are in the game.As for the player abilities in the game, I had a lot more ideas than we had time to implement. But I'm still very happy with the result, because we have the groundwork in place to add abilities very quickly if we want to, the intended system is in place.

I actually wanted to implement what I called an "overcharge" ability, but we didn't have time for it. The idea was to play around with "unstable liquids" and add more to the crazy scientist theme we had for the playable character, but it never came to fruition.

While there were a lot of people involved in the project, we were 8 game developers with 6 people making sounds and music for us.I'm very happy with the result and working with the sound designers was a pleasure!

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