Colorsseum

Colorsseum is a 2D top-down shooter game created for the Brackeys game jam 2021.2 in one week. Your goal is clear all the enemy waves. Each enemy has a specific color. To kill the enemies you have to shoot them with arrows that match their colors. Shooting enemies with the wrong color will make them stronger and more difficult to defeat.

After clearing each wave, you will pick an item (power-up) from a list of random items. This way you can collect different combinations of items in each run that will help you defeat the final boss!

Background and Development

The theme for this game jam was "Let There Be Chaos". So, at first we wanted to make a bullet hell game, but we knew that everyone else would go with the same idea. So, we came up with the twist of using colors. Shooting enemies with the wrong color will make them stronger causing more chaos.

The development team consisted of 3 people: me as the programmer and designer, and 2 artists.

My Contributions

- I designed and programmed all the gameplay mechanics.

- I designed the AI for the different enemy types and implemented it.

- I designed the power-ups and implemented them.

- Project management: managing and assigning tasks to other team members and setting deadlines.

- Importing and integrating the art assets.

Tasks & Challenges

Wave Spawner

The first challenge I faced in this project was the wave spawning system. When the wave starts, the 4 gates of the colorsseum open and enemies start entering onto the arena. When spawning an enemy, we first select a random unit color and assign them a random gate to be spawned there. After that, they move onto the arena and stops at one of the random starting points (points prevoiusly specified on the arena). Once all the enemies of the wave are on the arena, the gates close and the battle starts.

Besides the main waves, there are minions waves that start when the boss changes his phase.

WaveSpawner.cs

Enemy.cs

GameManager.cs

Interactive Tutorial

Since teaching the game mechanics to the players is really important, we needed a tutorial. Instead of explaining the rules of the game with bricks of boring texts, I decided to make an interactive tutorial. This interactive tutorial will give the players some instructions on how to play and then wait for them until they perform the necessary actions before moving on to the next set of instructions. This way we can make sure the players know the rules of the game before playing it.

For this tutorial system I created two special classes for the player and a dummy enemy.

TutorialManager.cs

PlayerTutorial.cs

ShootingTutorial.cs

Items & Power-ups

One of the most important elements in the game is the power-ups the player get after clearing each wave. When clearing a wave, a small shop will appear in the middle of the arena with 3 random items. The player can pick any of the 3 items before moving on to the next wave. In each run the player can collect up to 4 items before facing the final boss.

By randomizing the items that appear in the shop in each run, the player can build different combinations of power-ups and mix their abilities in unique ways.