Overview

Entomic Crushing is a small arcade game in which you try to get the best score on the global leaderboard by killing insect-looking enemies, taking inspiration from old-school arcade games and the game Devil Daggers.

Gameplay

In terms of gameplay, EC has a typical arcade style game loop:  you kill as many enemies as you can before you die. 

You are equipped with a chain, that is used as a weapon and a method of transportation. Each chain use also has a special ability which can be triggered by holding the shift key before using that ability: when attacking it will pull the enemy towards you & when grappling it will pull the player towards the grapple point. 

I wanted the game to feel smooth and snappy, things that I achieved by making a responsive player controller with a bit of camera rotation when moving in a certain direction.

Environment

The arena is a big equilateral triangle made of smaller ones. These small triangles are the platforms in which the action takes place.  Every 60 seconds 3 of these platforms rise at 10 times the height of the player. On these towers the player is meant to grapple around and avoid enemies in a fast paced manner.

Enemies

Each enemy was designed to fit the high range of movement of the player. Each enemy has a high contrast shining element that is there to help the player see them a little through the fog.

Why choose bugs as enemies? I chose bugs as it inherently induced a sense of uneasiness to the player when they jumped right in.

The Bug - This is the most basic enemy, which was designed to be easily crushed. It can only move of the lower platforms.

The Cricket - It was designed to keep the player from holing onto the lower walls and kill the small bugs from a place where they cant reach you.

The Dragonfly - This is arguably one of the most annoying insects to deal with. The enemy has a high range of movement and, upon noticing the player, will not stop following him until it lands a hit. After dealing damage to the player, the insect retreats back to the sky, ready to attack again if the player climbs too high.

The Firefly - The least frequent to spawn - this insect is one of the most dangerous but also, if killed in time, the most rewarding. If the firefly gets too close to the player, it will explode and will take away about half of the players HP, but if tit is killed before arriving that close, the player  will gain 20% of the whole HP back. So be careful not to land on one of these!

Audio

The audio is a morph of the real life sounds and the grainy feel of old-school games. The player has spatial audio, so players had to listen if an enemy was close to them of farther away when listening with headphones.

Atmosphere

I wanted the atmosphere of the game to be a dark and gloomy one, with loads of fog and uncertainty wherever you are. The platform is held up in the middle of a cloud shaped volumetric fog floor. The fog is quite dense on purpose, as I didnt want the player to see the enemies that were on the ground when in air, and vice versa - I hope this added a certain sense of uncertainty wherever the player is. I used a small number of colors that contrast well against each other - grey, white, red, yellow - in order to give the player a chance to see peaks of what is going on further away, without painting a clear picture.

In terms of style, I went with an old-school pixelated look, which went hand in hand with the low poly style of the enemy models, giving the project a ps1 style vibe. I wanted the actions of the player feel juicy and responsive, and for that I added splash particles on each interaction. 

Takeaways

This was an awesome project to work on and I have a few takeaways that I learned along the way.

-Make systems whenever you can: One thing I wish I did from the start was to think big and in systems, as building every enemy script on its own when they all share some factors was inefficient and entangled a lot of code.

-Plan ahead: This piece of advice is often heard but not emphasized enough. EC had a pretty well structured plan, and even so I was not able to make it more versatile. I should have divided every part of the game in more complex systems that were easily changeable. After finishing the game I cannot add a new enemy easily or change the arena without some compromises.

-Make a Tutorial: This is a crucial part of the game that I forgot add in. After a lot of people tested my game and were asked for feedback, most of them said it was had at first to know which buttons to press in order to what. 

Fin.

Thank you for reading about everything I thought about when making this game, it was an awesome journey. I will cease development on this project to move to another fun project.