How To Play!

Press space to adjust power and angle before launching your sword at the ghosts! Try to use as little swords as possible. Good luck!

Description

This is a very simple and cute warrior hamster battling against ghosts by launching his sword around! Watch as your power builds up and launch your sword at the perfect angle to take out all of the ghosts! I really enjoy working on game loops that are easy to expand upon, so I thought something like this would be an easy mechanic to shift around for multiple levels! I ran into several issues making the game, many of which had to do with prefab interactions and learning to call from other scripts. I really wanted to use a particle system or trail renderer for the swords path, but I could not figure out how to do it nicely, so that’s something I want to improve on for my next game! Additionally, sometimes my sound effects don't work and I'm not sure how to fix it. I thought it was an issue of the sound being triggered by the prefab that gets destroyed, but even when it is triggered by an object constantly in the hierarchy it still doesn't work sometimes.

One Button Approach

I decided to make a timing one-button game, where you press and hold until you feel like it’s the perfect angle and speed to launch your object through the map! I wanted to do this because it felt possible for my skill level, yet would still require me to further learn Unity. I had dappled in rotation and timing in my previous final for Sean’s class, which was a simple bullet hell, and the idea of turning those new things I learned into a player-controlled mechanic felt like an attainable goal for me. My idea did have to change, as initially, I wanted there to be a set angle range for the sword to swivel between and for the slider to go up and down continuously. While I feel implementing those aspects is achievable, I prioritized what I could do and improved upon that instead of getting stuck on those ideas. The angle one intimidated me because everything I found online seemed very math-focused and I was afraid of getting frustrated with completely unfamiliar territory. The slider I believe was probably easy to implement, but I don’t have much experience in adjusting UI elements so I focused on making something that just works instead. Overall, while I couldn’t achieve all of the mechanics the way I originally envisioned, the game is completely playable and I’m proud of that!

Balance

Since I made multiple levels, I was really able to tweak and feel the difficulty of the game since it was supposed to get more challenging with each level. For one, I had to make sure the action in the game wasn’t tedious since players were bound to use it multiple times. This way the obstacles could be challenging but not necessarily frustrating. Based on player feedback, I scaled back the difficulty of level 2, as I was getting consistent comments that it was harder than level 3.

Communication

I was able to explore with hitstop for this game, which is something I’ve been meaning to try as I think it is a really satisfying effect! Personally, I think this + screenshake + the hit sound rewards the player with a satisfying effect, especially since your sword can chain through multiple enemies at a time.

Iteration

Since a one-button game usually focuses solely on one mechanic, getting that mechanic to feel “good” took a lot of iteration. The speed that the sword spins, how fast the slider fills up, and the physics of the sword bouncing around all went through several rounds of changes in order to create something I and others were satisfied with. For instance, the drag on the sword was initially much higher, making the game almost feel billiards-like. After testing, I and others agreed that having the sword freely fly around created a more exciting and action-feeling mechanic, which led to the sword’s behavior as it is now.

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