Hell Gene

Project Overview

Role: Gameplay Designer / Developer, Character Animator, UI / VFX Designer

Collaborators:

Jonathan Newman - Lead Sound Designer, Programmer
Alyssa Marie Umbal - Lead Artist
Benedict Wong - Gameplay Designer, Programmer
Nathan Cerone - Project Manager, Level Designer, Programmer
Stratos Argentius - Gameplay Designer, Artist, Animator

Tools Used:

Unity (C#)
Aseprite

Duration: 7 days (August 22nd 2021 - August 29th 2021)

Project Screenshots

Project Description

Hell Gene is a roguelike hack and slash game created for Brackey's Game Jam 2021.2, with the main theme being "Let There Be Chaos". In Hell Gene, you play as Eugene Martez, a descendant of the Demon King on a quest to reject his heritage. In the process, he takes up different weapons to try and escape through the ever-changing rooms of Hell.

Featuring procedurally generated level generation and a combat system with a large variety of weapons, Hell Gene was a great technical learning experience.

Gameplay Design

In designing gameplay, the team first broke down the term "chaos" and how we could present the feeling of chaos to a player. From there, we decided to focus on irregularity as a core gameplay element, which led to the decision to include procedural generation.

In addition, we opted to visually clutter the screen in order to present a lack of order to the player. In interpreting the phrase "let there be", we also decided to give the player control over the chaos by allowing them to choose between more power or an easier stage.

Gameplay screenshot of Hell Gene.

Graphics & Visuals

Adhering to the theme of chaos, many of my animations were made to be big and fast, in order to occupy the screen with movement. Particles were also used heavily in order to further display a lack of order and take up screen space, further conveying the chaotic feel of the game.

In light of the visual direction of the game, the main focus in designing the UI was to convey the most important information to the player as effectively as possible due the constant movement elsewhere in the game. I ended up deciding on Health, Chaos Level, Equipped Weapons and Weapon Durability as the most important to convey due to these variables' high impact on gameplay.

Laser VFX for Hell Gene. The base of the laser was created in Aseprite to match the pixel-y nature of the VFX.

Animated effect for sword slashes. The frames were drawn to match the attack animation.

Front-facing attack animation. The most challenging part of this animation was getting the motion of the cape right.

UI Item Frame for Hell Gene. The image of the current held item is displayed in the semi-transparent black box, while the respective weapon's durability is indicated by the thin vertical bar on the right.

Development

During development, I was in charge of programming the procedural generation system for levels, ranged weapon and projectile behaviours, as well as parts of item spawning.

One main challenge of the development of Hell Gene was the breadth of tasks I undertook in addition to the above programming, however I believe that proper time management and clear directives allowed me to accomplish a large variety of tasks during the game jam.

Sample code image from Hell Gene, showing a switch-case containing some different ranged attack options and their start-up properties.

Takeaways

Through this project, I was able to learn a lot of technical skills in Unity, from procedural generation to particle systems. One of the bigger challenges, however, was trying to take on too many different roles at once during the course of this project, which I feel may have led to quite a few rushed areas. Despite that, we managed to finish in the top third of a game jam with over 1700 entries.

I want to not only continue working on the skills I've developed over the course of the game jam, but to take the lessons learned and apply them to my work moving forward.

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