A Very Hard Game

Playable in browser

This game was created as the final project to my Intro to Unity course. As this was my first full game, I struggled a lot, not only with making it work, but making it fun. I set out to make a bullet hell game with my inspiration being World's Hardest Game (I settled for a more modest title). I had done object-oriented programming before learning Unity, so I understood the basics, but because this was my first real experience using prefabs and scenes, I thought making a level-based progression system with bullets and collectibles would be a great way to test my skill in these areas.

I'm still very proud of the result that came of this class, but with experience, I've come to realize many flaws in this game. If I were to do it over, the first thing I would change would be having the bullet prefabs be collected using a bullet collector around the edges of the map. Currently, the game just gives each bullet a lifetime upon spawning, which ends up with cannons shooting through the walls and inconsistent shot length even within the same cannon. The next thing I would change would be to add a light source other than the default. The game as it is is very difficult, but not for the reasons you would want it to be. The main source of difficulty is there are no shadows on the ground to sense depth when the player is jumping. This leads to the player often falling onto bullets or moving in ways they wouldn't have expected. Through playing and creating games, I've seen firsthand how frustrating unforgiving mechanics can be.

On the other hand, there are some things that I am still proud of looking back. Taking inspiration from games like Super Meat Boy, I made the respawn time as low as I possibly could so that the player could jump right back into the game upon failure. This makes losing less punishing and makes the player less frustrated with each death. It enables faster learning and thus faster progression, and I expect to use this idea again in the future.