Update: A playable prototype can be found at this Download link

This will be the first in a series of posts diving into the development process of a game I’ve been working on prototyping - a genre mashup of bullet hell shoot-em-ups (bullet hells) and rhythm games.

This first post will focus on the project’s design.

Background

When it comes to making groundbreaking new ideas for games, there is a lot of potential in genre mashups. I believe that game developers can get a lot of mileage out of combining together game genres that already exist rather than necessarily trying to create a brand new genre from scratch. So, when I try to think of innovative new game ideas, I try to focus less on the question of “what’s a type of game that no one has created before?” and more on the question “what’s a combination of games that no one has made before?”

Slay the Spire is a perfect example of this - a roguelike-deckbuilder hybrid that paces itself to match the progression of any typical roguelike (advancing to more difficult areas and simultaneously collecting more powerful items) and any typical deckbuilder (building a more powerful, synergistic deck over the course of the game) in a complementary way. Neither of these individual elements are radically re-imagined in Slay the Spire, but the combination of the two are what makes the game stand out.

Now, slapping any two game genres together can make a game appear fresh and new, but this doesn’t automatically make the game’s design a good one. I imagine that something like a racing-horror game or a trivia-platformer game would be… difficult to pull off. Though who knows, maybe these examples have some hidden untapped potential!

Bullet hell - rhythm game hybrid

This particular genre mashup is one I’ve had in my head for a while, and I think the biggest reason it would work so well is because both types of games capture a similar fantasy - a specific feeling or gameplay experience that a game attempts to evoke.

There are a lot of elements of these two genres that share the same fantasy:

• Both tend to have very fast-paced, high-intensity gameplay focused on there being a lot of things on the screen to dodge (in the case of bullet hells) or hit (in the case of rhythm games).
• The game looks visually impressive with the screen often being full of projectiles/notes. This both gives the player a huge feeling of satisfaction when they’re able to clear a difficult section of the game, and also looks visually impressive to spectators - “Woah, how did they do that? There’s so much going on at once!”
• Dodging bullets and hitting notes both require good reaction time and a lot of practice for particularly difficult sections. The key to success often lies in being able to sort through the visual noise on the screen and determine what you actually need to focus on at any given time.
• Playing the game at one’s highest level requires them to enter into a sort of flow state in which they are able to react to things happening on the screen seemingly without having to think. For me, this is the most satisfying part of both kinds of games.

At their core, these two genres seem like a perfect fit.

There are a handful of examples of bullet hells and rhythm games being combined, the most prominent of which is likely Just Shapes & Beats. This game seems to appeal to the above elements nicely, providing a fast-paced dodging experience in which every aspect of the game’s bullet patterns and animations are on-beat with the soundtrack. This should serve as a good model for further exploring a mashup between bullet hells and rhythm games.

There are a number of design considerations to make which I’ll go into more detail about in future posts, but my high level design goal is to have my prototype appeal to this fantasy I’ve outlined.

Prototype work

I chose to use the Unity engine to create a prototype, and will be going forward with using it if I end up creating a larger project based on this idea. The scope of the prototype is a ~30 second experience focused on dodging basic patterns, with very little focus being put on art.

The real meat of this prototype lies in the backend systems which is what I’ve focused on for most of its development. There are two particular elements of the framework:

• A pattern configuration system to set up how and when enemies spawn, move, and fire patterns. The “when” of this is important since I need to be able to easily synchronize the game logic to the timing of the soundtrack.
• A system for creating individual bullet patterns. I’ve chosen to use Unity’s particle system to create bullets since it has a strong toolset for configuring and visualizing particles. However, a good amount of work has needed to go into making this usable for configuring patterns in a fast and reliable manner.

These elements contain the majority of the prototype’s complexity and probably both warrant their own post at some point.

Currently, the prototype is mostly playable, though I’ll want to finish making improvements to the
framework before configuring more of the front-end. Here’s a snapshot of what I have so far:

I’ll be excited to see what I can do with this prototype once the framework is in a more complete spot. Stay tuned for updates!

Update: A playable prototype can be found at this Download link.