Introduction to Video Game Design
https://naritai.itch.io/danmaku-ordinance I’ve made a short level for my Touhou-style game. I had ideas and even character designs that I didn’t have time to add though. I couldn’t even add the pixel art my friend made.
Because I’m sad I didn’t get to add this, here’s the second character design I made; she was going to be first stage boss. While it sucks it ended up this way, I’m definitely interested in finishing this some day, or at least using the character designs elsewhere!
I added collision and player bullets. I also made my level/wave system pretty comprehensive and able to support multiple levels and all kinds of edge cases. Mainly, a lot of things I didn’t expect came up and I spent the week mostly accounting for those.
Basically, I now have a modular system that starts with a level resource that contains wave resources. From there I can handle things like spawning enemies and doing complicated bullet patterns. Most of the unexpected complexity came from me not initially realizing how complicated it was to do fancy Touhou-style patterns, but now that I have the tedious framework done, I can start making actual levels.
For this week I’m going to work on adding the art assets in and getting a full, polished level completed. I also want to try making music since Touhou is known for its music.
Since 2D is fine, I continued with my Touhou Project-style game. There was already gameplay in the last post so this one doesn’t look too different, but under the hood a lot has changed.
I now have a “wave” system so I can make levels out of different waves of enemies. Collision hasn’t been implemented yet though, so you can’t actually die or shoot enemies.
I made two boss character designs and one of my friends drew pixel art. This is one of the boss designs, but my friend’s pixel art looks blurry when uploaded on here for some reason.
The pixel art would be used in the actual gameplay and the full portrait art would appear for dialogue. I will probably make one more boss character and a protagonist character. I like the designs I made so far, so maybe one day I’ll come back to this and turn it into a full-length game. Touhou games usually are 5 levels and an extra level, I’m aiming to make 2-3 levels for now.
Here’s my Godot scene, it’s in 2D but I do understand how to use the 3D tools too. I was mainly just trying to get a hang of the coding workflow and made a small Touhou Project-style bullethell demo.
https://naritai.itch.io/crystal-nights I finished up my platformer and took the feedback into account. The main complaint was the sudden difficulty so I made some jumps a little easier and tightened up the controls.
The main addition I made was inheriting momentum from moving platforms to fling yourself! I think it’s a really fun mechanic and it actually spawned from a bug where you could do tiny hops repeatedly on the moving platforms to avoid the low friction in the second level.
Overall it’s certainly very inspired by Celeste and I’m pretty satisfied with the controls and pixel art.
I made two levels for my platformer and polished the art up, the second level has a bit less friction on the tiles because I wanted to do an icy level. I also made some moving platforms. I drew the item sprites as well and added a small GUI that pops up shortly in the top left when collecting one or idling.
I made some changes to the player sprites, created a small tileset, and added temporary backgrounds. I also added camera movement and parallax, player deaths, and a room transition to handle the end of levels.
The theming is very snowy and cold; the levels are barely complete right now, but I’m going to program friction so that the icy tiles in the second level will make the player slide around a little. I’ll also add some ambient snow particles. I may program some kind of mechanic like dashing or wall-jumps to make the gameplay more interesting as well.
This is my platformer character design, I tried to draw her based off of the art style in Celeste. She is also based off of Satori Komeiji from Touhou Project. I think the idle and run sprite still need some work but the jump/fall animations look pretty good.
https://naritai.itch.io/rest-in-petals My slightly comedic and slightly emotional game about a bunny revisiting a garden one last time has been completed. The friend who’s late bunny this is dedicated to enjoyed the game greatly, so I am quite content with how it turned out.
The main feedback I got was about it being hard to tell where you could walk or not, so I tried to make the exit in the initial room clearer so the player can learn what the exits look like. There’s even some new dialogue to hopefully point the player in the right direction. People mainly liked the art, attention to detail, and the personality put into the dialogue, so I tried to expand on that with the final few rooms. It appears someone from outside the class happened to play it and comment on the game page too!
I’ve made a few more rooms for my Bitsy game where you play as a bunny and talk to flowers. It’s still untitled, however.
I’ve been having fun coming up with dialogue and scenarios. I tried to make lots of dialogue that changes based on your actions or from talking to the flowers multiple times. Creating the tileset was much more work than I expected, but once I got the hang of it, I started enjoying creating things like a 3×3 tile statue in one room.
Overall, I think it’s about halfway done. The tone and general direction are pretty much set in stone.
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