Design

For this project we wanted to reverse the 2D topdown horde combat of Vampire Survivors on its head by mixing it with the minion control of Pikmin. With only a few parameters for each NPC (movement speed, aggro range, health, damage, ranged or melee attack, plus a few other misc ones) we could create a variety of interested emergent scenarios depending on what minions you have available and what enemies you are going up against.

Controlling your minions with the totem placement allows for moderate player agency while also balancing with the sometimes-unpredicatable minion behaviour when they detect an enemy. This ai system in combination with the character voices works well to sell the comedic element of the game as you try to herd your undead minions around the game world.

Making the player vulnerable by giving them low health and little control over their own automatic attacks was essential for promoting players to engage with the hoard-building mechanics and finding the fun at the heart of the games systems. This choice also required careful balancing of the NPC stats to create a difficulty curve that was engaging and not too punishing for first time players.

Roughly every minute, a squad of enemies hones in on your location, each time increasing in difficulty. Before this mechanic was implemented, the game world could begin to feel stale as there was little variation in gameplay experience beyond discovering the new biomes, npcs, and item pickups.

The score leaderboard is also essential for promoting the competitive play that keeps players hooked and was implemented by Andy. Without it, the game is missing a strong incentive to carry on once you have experienced getting to the higher difficulties.

Environments

The environment segments are all procedurally generated using square tilemap prefabs with randomly placed props (houses, statues, debris – any of the decorative pieces scattered throughout) with parameters defining the distance between them and the proportion of each prop spawning. The various square terrain segments include the town, forest, desert, snow, castle, and graveyard – each with their specified props spawning within.

Andy programmed the intuitive proc gen system with helpful GUIs for prop placement areas and prop blocking areas, whereas I was responsible for painting the tilemaps and setting the props and their distributions.

Movement

The player movement system is very simple using high acceleration and deceleration values for responsive gameplay, and the player movement speed has been tuned so as to balance well with the variety of types of NPCs.

Audio

As Wwise doesn’t support WebGL builds, I wrote my own primitive audio systems to mimic its functionality.

The music layering has the three tracks playing simultaneouly on game start and their priority shifts based on the players wanted level, which is determined based on how long they have survived. This seamlessly transitions the music tracks as you advance through the game, building tension and variation.

The sound effects are managed through a singleton instancer making them easy to call from anywhere in the solution, spawning at the position of the sound source so as to allow for volume attenuation and panning based on the distance between the sound source and the player’s location.

Art

A sprite y-sorting system was needed to make sure sprites were rendered in the correct order based on their position, which simply checks the position of the lower y bound of the sprite every few frames and sets the sprite renderer sorting order based on its value.

I also created the designs for the game logo, the controls sprites used during the starting tutorial, the banner art, the itch page, and the trailer visuals.

Polish

As the gameplay is fairly simple, a high level of visual polish was necessary to sell the experience. The lighting was the biggest key to achieving the horror-comedy atmosphere, created with a low intensity on the Global Light and plenty of moving Point Lights with Shadowcasters littered around the scene on the various props.

The basic UI bar displaying player health and score was designed to be unintrusive and scalable to different screen sizes, and alongside this I implemented various other elements such as floating text when your score increases, sprite flash and screenshake upon the player taking damage, and a subtle amount of noise applied to the cameras position to create a scene of unease.