Shield Maidens

Twin stick shooter with puzzle and combat levels in local multiplayer with 3 players needed. Made with Unity3D. Project at RUBIKA with me, another programmer, 4 artists and 5 designers in two weeks. You are a maiden with a shield that can reflect attacks and you can bump things with it. Since you are a team of 3, you must help each other to solve the puzzles and defeat the enemies. Your only source of damage is every attack that is sent to you and if reflected correctly will deal damage or activate a receptacle.

About the background

Background

As a student of RUBIKA, we had to make a twin stick shooter game with some rules. It must be a cooperation game in local multiplayer, with no friendly-fire and try to do more than shooting at everything. The teams were decided by the teachers and fortunately my team was well-rounded.

About my work on movements

My work on movements

Since we were 2 programmers, I began to work on the players' movements. I wanted to make something good and tested some things for the shield rotation. Simply using the raw values of the right stick was not enough, since there was puzzle and precise puzzle, the player needed a smooth rotation that got slower the closer it is to the raw values. Before that, I also tried a button that would put the shield in a step-by-step mode with 45° each step but it was too easy to solve puzzles and there was no accuracy needed anymore so it was discarded.

About my work on macro

My work on macro

For the game to work, some macro elements were needed. First, we wanted many levels but with no abrupt change of scenes. So I made a simple system of loading additive scene. To accompany it, I made a camera that move from position to position with its boundaries forcing the player to move or die if they got squeezed by a wall. I also made a death system where a player remains as a ghost (with different physics and can bypass walls) and another player must bump him to revive him. If all players died, I made a checkpoint system that revives dead players when one alive reaches it and if all are dead they respawn at the last one.

About the problems

Problems

Everything went well until the last day. When we tried to build the game, it was meet with repeated failures but there was 2 majors ones right at the first level : a cube with a (0,0,0) scale that was failling the building and, since we wanted to use interfaces we used Odin but that was a mistake. When building, the list of interfaces where randomly erased of their references, making the game impossible to advance. It was late at nigth and I tried to repair this by removing all list and replace them by 3 simple arguments since there was never more than 3 used. It worked but needed to go in all levels to repair links. That took 1-2 hours but we made it. Unfortunately, the game was not play tested and bugs are presents. But it made me realize that building early on is mandatory.

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