College Project: Skills Gap 1 - Part 2

Continuing the skill gap week (Check out the last blog post) I designed and developed level 1 of the my mobile tarot game.

The next tarot is 1 The Magician. This is the first proper level of the game and should set a bar for the difficulty in later levels.

Because of The Magicians key words: “Action”, “Conscious Awareness” and “Concentration”, I felt like this should have the player constantly moving and paying attention to their surroundings.

The obstacles in this section should be Wands. Their keywords include: “Courageous”, “Confident”, “Bold” and “Restless”. Not to mention that this level is based on “The Magician”.

Wands obviously make you think of magic, so I felt that they should shoot some magical projectile that needs to be dodged.

In Mario games the Koopalings all have wands. They all have different attacks, but my favorite is Ludwig Von Koopa, who fires four magic fireballs.

I think these work well as they remind me of obstacles from other bullet hell games like Touhou and Undertale:

I’m thought I could start with these projectiles being bigger and easy to doge, like with Ludwig’s fireballs. Then have them explode into smaller projectiles, taking more inspiration from Undertale, like this star attack:

These fire balls would have a comet-like shape and explode into smaller embers. The center would be yellow or orange and the outside would be red to keep the red glow that comes with harmful obstacles.

The actual wands would be designed, like the tarot, as a wooden staff with leaves growing off it.

Creating Level 1

Firstly, I scripted the wand to periodically shoot four projectiles in a splayed direction. I did this by adding velocity to the projectiles and spawning them at rotated spawning points around the tip of the wand.

Then I had the fireball spawn smaller projectiles after 3 seconds while destroying itself. These projectiles are splayed behind the fireball, so they shoot toward the player.

This is the design I went with. Through trial and error I managed to design it so that you can make it through without taking damage, while still being a considerable challenge.

The final 3 wands are different, the first two shooting fireballs much faster and the last one launching 20 sparks instead of fire balls. This is to give the player a tougher challenge at the end of the level as they have to quickly adjust.

While testing on mobile I realized that it lagged whenever the fireballs exploded, so it created checkpoints that activates obstacles ahead the player and deactivates obstacles behind the player.

Finally, I added the red lighting effect to the fireballs and sparks and the level is done.

Level 1 Gameplay

The final and third part will be uploaded on Saturday!