2D Game Project: Player Bullet Design

A few weeks ago we finally started to make an actual game. A 2D “space shooter”. The definition of space shooter is that the player Avatar has to be able to shoot and that gravity is not allowed. So no 2D platformer here.

From the available concepts to choose from my group, named Team 5, chose a game called “The Last Signal”. Compared to the other concept available this is a game that actually takes place in space! The player takes the role of an astronaut who is trapped in a spaceship that has been overrun by an alien threat. Since there is no gravity the player controls the character by controlling two thrusters located on the backpack. Fire up one and the avatar rotates, fire the other and the avatar rotates in the other direction. Fire up both and the avatar takes off straight ahead. This control scheme together with the ability to shoots the aliens will hopefully become an intriguing game.

Since this is a shooter there needs to be some kind of projectile involved. This is what I have been doing. Since the character is carrying a plasma rifle the lead designer and I looked at different kinds of plasma and settled on the look of these glass balls that you can buy in stores that has what looks like lightning in them that is drawn to your fingertips if you place them on the glass. I have no idea what they are called. The lead designer told me to capture the feel of that ball but instead of glass surrounding it some kind of futuretech forcefield would be utilized.

I looked at photos for reference and started working.

I began with the layer furthest down, that layer represents the force field, and worked my way up. A clear core where the energy is emanating from streaming out to the outer shell. I made all these things in separate layers in photoshop so that they can easily be animated in later stages of the production.

This is what I finally came up with.

But! Since I worked in a greater resolution than the final product (80×80 pixels) a lot of the detail disappeared when it was shrunken down to the correct size (20×20). Also when I saw the projectile being used in the game engine i realized that it will probably have to be tweaked because it was a bit hard to read both because of color and size. More testing is required to determine where to take it from here.

There is also another kind of projectile in the game, something called Compressed Plasma Rounds (CPR). These are smaller and a bit differently colored than the normal projectiles.

They look like this.

Lots of work is left but I am confident that it will pay off in the end.