Shape Shooter

Little endless 2D top down shooter, developed to learn new skills in game development.

LEARNED SKILLS, briefly:

• 2D game fundamentals such as sprite movement, game object destroying, interaction between objects.
• Basic enemy AI and generation.
• Progression system and increasing difficulty system with upgrades for the player and the enemies.
• Save/load system for maximum score.
• UI building with animation and sounds and game styling with visual effects.
• Player feedback: screen shake, sound, particle systems, trail renderers, animations.
• Audio design and music creation.
• Camera integration with Cinemachine.
• Mobile game implementation.

LEARNED SKILLS, in detail:

• 2D game fundamentals: sprite movement in 2 dimensions, which differs from 3D games, has been implemented for the player and the enemies.

Also, the logic for managing both the enemies and the player has been created. A basic life system has also been created: a managing maximum life and current life of enemies and the player, damaging with a basic bullet system, destroying enemies, and finishing the game if the player dies.

• Basic enemy AI and generation: 3 types of basic enemies have been implemented:
  • A normal enemy that chases the player all the time.
  • A bigger enemy that chases the player all the time, but is slower, damages more and has more life.
  • A ranged enemy, which has less life but can shoot projectiles to the player if it reaches certain distances.

These different enemies lead to more interesting gameplay, which encourage continuous movement on the player, and interesting choices as targeting ranged enemies, or bigger enemies.

The enemies always spawn around the player, but out of the scope of the camera, so they appear all the time, but the spawning is not visible.

• Progression system and increasing difficulty system with upgrades for the player and the enemies: There has been implemented a basic levelling system, that increases level by one every 15 points (normal enemies provide 1 point, the others provide 2). Every level, the player can choose 1 of 3 random perks (there are 6 perks in total):
  • Increasing maximum life
  • Healing completely
  • Increasing attack power
  • Increasing attack speed
  • Increasing movement speed
  • Throwing a bomb that clears the level
  Enemies, also level up every time the player does, so there is an increasing level of difficulty. They randomly choose between (increasing spawn rate, increasing damage, increasing life or increasing movement speed).

• Save/load system for maximum score: by using Unity's integrated "PlayerPrefs" object, a maximum score save/load system has been implemented.
• UI building with animation and sounds and game styling with visual effects: a basic UI has been created to navigate through the menus. To provide feedback while navigating, animations and sounds have been set. Also, a pause/resume option is available.

Finally, by using Unity's post-processing stack, some visual effects have been implemented, such as bloom, vignette and others.

• Player feedback: screen shake, sound, particle systems, trail renderers, animations: To provide more feedback when playing, shooting sounds, impact sounds and animations, screen shake, particle effects and trail renderers have been used both with enemies and the player.
• Audio design and music creation: the music has been created in Reaper by using virtual instruments. SFX have been created with online tools.
• Camera integration with Cinemachine: a smoothed camera has been implemented using Unity's integrated Cinemachine package.

• Mobile game implementation: a joystick input system has been implemented so the game can be played in mobile devices.