I really enjoy Bullet Hell games and, being a game developer, I wanted to make my own. I made a little proof of concept about 2 years ago with Unity but life was far too hectic at the time to follow through with it. I recently picked up Godot, which is a neat little engine with its own Python-esque scripting language, so I figured I’d give this idea another shot.
The twist of the game is that the player cannot shoot like they would normally in a bullet-hell game, instead they have to reflect enemy bullets off of their shield! 🛡️
What I’ve got done so far:
- Movable player with rotatable shield (twin-stick controls)
- Working device builds (iOS & Android)
- Localisation. Currently just English and Japanese, because their character spacing, etc are worlds apart.
- Basic enemy movement behaviours: Strafe, Zig-Zag, Chase
- Basic enemy firing behaviours: Ring, (Single-/Multi-/Arc-)Spiral,
In progress:
- Lock-On (laser) weapon system (video below)
- Level data composition (How the levels are structured / put together)
What’s next?
I want to get a level written up and get it onto the Play Store (as an alpha release) so that I can get feedback from my friends/family/coworkers/cat and iterate on it. I want to have the core gameplay feeling pretty damn good before I even think about any other fluff.
Writing about it is all well and good but bread is quite boring if that’s all you eat, so here’s a quick video showing the state of the game right now:
At the moment, almost every sprite in the game is just the Godot logo with a tint applied; I want to get the core gameplay down before I begin to fiddle about with art and sound.
Because it’s not shown in the video above, here’s the laser weapon system demo: