What is :
Star Chaser was our 1st year's last project, developped on a 3 weeks span.
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Let's go through the basics shall we ?
This game is a side-scrolling Shoot'em Up. The game takes its inspiration from classic shoot'em up like Gradius & Ikaruga.
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In Star Chaser, you take the control of a Soviet spaceship charged with the mission reach a distant planet before the American Space Armada.
Your ship has the ability to shoot small projectiles and absorb the enemies' energy in order fill a gauge allowing to unlock 3 abilites :
- A shield that protects the player from 1 enemy's projectile.
- A powerful laser beam that practically oneshots every enemy.
- A Regen ability that restores the player's health.
The Abilities
Energy Absorption
As the name states, this ability allows the player to drain enemies' ships from their energy, as long as they're in the absorption's radius. This has 2 outcomes :
1) Enemies die once their energy is fully drained
2) Absorbing their energy fills the orange gauge in the screen's upper-left corner.
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This Gauge is divided in 3 thresholds :
1st : Shield
2nd : Laser Beam
3rd : Healing
Once the player uses one of these 3 abilities, their energy gauge is emptied, forcing the player to get in absorption range.
Shield
A shied that allows to prevent 1 enemy projectilefrom dealing damages to the player.
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We designed it in a way to allow the player to make a split second decision on wether or not they're ready to empty their energy gauge to prevent damages, or, suffer several damages to use the Laser Beam.
Laser Beam
A powerful Laser Beam that kills practicaly instantly the enemies standing on its way.
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We designed it as a way to get rid of big swarms of enemies, but its cost in energy makes it harder to reach when the gauge is empty, thus emphasizing the risky aspect of this ability.
Still, being the second energy threshold makes it a good risk-reward ratio for its utility.
Regen
The ability to replenish your ship's "health". The most expensive ability of them al that allows the player to save themself from a certain death.
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Being the last ability to unlock, it requires the player a certain amount of skill in order to snake between the enemies' projectiles, and being able to get their health back.
Post Mortem
This project was my first glimpse at the responsibilities a project lead could handle, but most importantly, my first real try at putting together a project solely relying on Risk & Reward, as it was my intention.
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The pitch mainly came from my obssession with the classic arcade hit Ikaruga, and I wanted to try and give a personal approach on the notion of Risk & Reward.
To achieve this, I thought that having to get close to enemies' swarms was a good way of circling back to one of the most primordial aspect of Shoot'em ups : Movement.
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Overall, as a 1st year project, I think that the result we get to as a team is really satisfying, even though it is a bit rough around the edges.
The advantage of this project is that it was easy to set up for first-year students with a low programming level, still with a faire amount of challenges (cf : Managing UI and gauges, trying to set-up patterns for the enemies,etc).
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My role during this project, prototyping wise, was to set-up the game's basics : Player Movement (keyboard + controller), Absorption basis, Laser Beam basis, Enemies Trigger Scripts, Camera Work.