Fallen Angel

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2D Arcade Bullethell- Bloody, Biblical, Bullethell

Game Jam 2020, all done online via Discord with a team of 6

Download the game here

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Software I Used

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My Roles

As the Game and Level Designer my responsibilities included-

• Designing Combat and Enemies (Player Movement/Abilities, Enemy Variants, Player Buffs and Debuffs)

• Producing a GDD, Concepting Mechanics and Creating Level Designs

• Extensive QA Testing, recording and reporting bugs in detail to feedback to programmers

• Working alongside Programmers and Artists, communicating effectively by organising and participating in Daily Scrums and Team Meetings

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Walkthrough

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Screenshots

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Game Design

My initial design details a Vertically Scrolling, Rogue-like game with the theme of an Angel, turned rebel. As I iterated upon my concept the rogue-like tag was dropped in favour of a more Arcade game experience, with the Heavenly and Hellish themes alongside its Vertically Scrolling format remaining core.

After finalising the concept for the game, I progressed to concepting the core mechanics of the game. This included designing fundamental systems for the Player Character ranging from Player Movement, Attacks and Abilities, and the Health System to finer mechanics like the Reset Dash mechanic and the Diablo Form. I ensured each mechanic would adhere to and improve the core gameplay experience.

After finalising the concept for the game, I progressed to concepting the core mechanics of the game. This included designing fundamental systems for the Player Character ranging from Player Movement, Attacks and Abilities, and the Health System to finer mechanics like the Reset Dash mechanic and the Diablo Form. I ensured each mechanic would adhere to and improve the core gameplay experience.

While many of these ideas were later iterated and tweaked in the final product, the fine details of my design documents helped clearly communicate my designs to artists and programmers. This ensured Players’ personal Power-fantasies to be fully realised, coherent and most importantly fun.

Fallen Angel Game Design

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Combat Design

For my enemy designs, I wanted to create a wide cast of unique enemies that each felt distinctly different from one another. To do this I took inspiration from Plants Vs Zombie’s designer George Fan and his 2017 GDC talk ‘Make Your Enemies Actually Different!’.

My reasonability was to conceptualise enemies, their attack patterns, unique properties and abilities. I then had to communicate these properties to artists and programmers accordingly. This culminated in the game featuring all 13 of my unique enemy variants and a boss battle, all fully programmed, animated and realised in 2D sprite art.

Fallen Angel Enemy Designs

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Level Design

Creating the level design for Fallen Angel was quite an unorthodox process because the game had no terrain that the player could interact with. This meant that players would transition into areas, shown by a moving background to visually indicate their progression.

This forced me to create a very atypical design, in which the level of difficulty and atmosphere of each area would be dictated by the amount and types of unique enemies that can are spawned during that section. In doing so I created distinct user experiences in each area, with areas above ground being significantly easier, acting as a subtle tutorial section whilst areas closer towards Hell would ramp up the difficulty, introducing new, more challenging enemy types the further the player progressed.

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