Corentin Bouchain
Game Designer
PORTFOLIO
MINISHOOT' ADVENTURES DEMO LINK
Fly into a charming handcrafted world and go on an adventure that mixes up open exploration with crispy twin-stick shooter action. Fight your way from the shiny overworld to the deepest caves, improve your ship and overcome the dungeons' bosses to rescue your friends!
Game Genre: Exploration, Metroidvania, Twin-Stick Shooter
Number of players: Solo game
Support: PC
Engine: Unity
My work
As part of a 2 and a half month internship at SoulGame Studios (an independent video game studio in Toulouse), I worked on the end-game content of Minishoot' Adventures.
I made 10 endgame content rooms (4 boss fight rooms and 6 rooms where you fight waves of enemies)
First, I had to familiarize myself with the working tools used, as well as the different facets of the game identity, in order to be able to start producing quickly and in accordance with the gaming experience offered by Minishoot'.
I worked under Unity with the different elements of the engine and tools created specifically for the project.
Secondly, by experimenting and mixing the different enemies encountered in Minishoot, I was able to understand how they worked and also brainstorm on different room setups that could then be reused.
Enemy Wave Battle Room
The first step was to establish a bullet “noise”.
With “solids” (=indestructible bullet source), as well as the shape of the room, we can create interesting setups to create the waves.
These mixes of gunshot noise and room shape should provide a challenge , but without the latter having the upper hand on the presence of enemies.
Indeed, the solids had to be a support to reinforce the enemy patterns, and not be the main danger in the room.
The goal of the solid is therefore to create a dodgeable bullet pattern that offers to constrain the navigation space in a fun way.
Once I had one or more interesting ideas, I iterated on them to explore them.
Here you can see a “classic” solid. It always shoots the same way, and is not destructible.
Later in my work, we realized that the rooms lacked identity, that there was no major theme except in the choice of enemies and the shape of the room.
We then chose to theme them according to the different biomes of the game. We brought out the emblematic enemies of each zone, and created the rooms to represent the biome, which gives for example this:
For example, some recurring enemies in the forest biome imitate bushes and trees. We choose to use them has the core of this battle room, in order to reinforce the thematic.
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The enemy at the center looking like a tree (timber) is a recurring opponent of the forest biome. We use him the same way we would use a solid (but a destructible one) in order to create a constant noise.
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You can also see bushes enemies (busher), those are hides in the room to surprise the player in the same way the forest biome would.
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Those two enemie are linked to the space and not the actual wave the player is facing, so he do not need ot destroy them in order to fight the next wave.
Boss Room
My second mission was to create an hardcore version of the 4 boss battle in the game.
At first, I had to figure out how those boss' patterns works (those are much more complex for the player than the usual enemies), in order to understand the challenged they offer.
Once this was done I then had to create those complex versions. Each boss, each of their patterns, in the same manner than the enemy wave battle room, possess their own identities and need to be easily recognizable.
Each of the hardcore boss are based on their counterpart in the game, so a part of my job was kind of already "done". Since each of their patterns were already polished at this point, it was a very good example to what I could aim for.
An easy way to resolve this problematic would have to been to increase the number of bullet or their speed but I constantly tried to reinforce their thematic, in order to challenge myself. It was a good way to surprise the player and make him challenge a whole new fight, while keeping the original feeling of the boss.
Since the player is maxed out when he face the hardcore version, I had to upgrade the challenge in order that each pattern match the player's actual capacity.