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ABOUT GHOOL 

A 2D Roguelite Dungeon Crawler about a War between a Slime and the Demon King

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Team Size

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Project Duration

Game Info

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  • Genre: 2D, Dungeon Crawler, Fantasy, Roguelite,  Twin Stick Shooter

  • Team: 2 Designers, 1 Artist, 3 Programmers

  • Tools: Unity, Adobe Photoshop, Google Docs and Sheets

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Game Engine

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Platform

Game Description​​

  • As the last slime bleeds its last drop of goo, the demon army has just annihilated all of the slime race and successfully invaded their world. However, all the goo of the dead slimes flowed and gathered at the Temple of the Goo Lord to form an unusual red slime. Now burning with anger and hatred of its deceased brethren, the slime resolved itself to slaughter the demon race and their Shogun. Thus, began this unusual red slime’s solitary revolt on the Shogun and the demon world, to take back their home.  

  • Play as the Ghool in this 2D roguelite dungeon crawler game where players have to use shoot-em-up style mechanics to defeat the demon army and the demon shogun in this action-packed conquest for freedom.

About this Game's Concept

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This game was made as part of the coursework for Game Project Studio 1 where it was my first long-term game development project and first experience with Unity. This game was made with certain requirements which includes the game to be a 2D PC game from Unity and a overarching theme of 'YOLO'. 

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With that, we interpreted the theme as taking risk and living in the moment so we wanted our gameplay experience to reflect that. This led to us creating the core concept of a slime using its own goo (HP) as its bullets to attack enemy. This led to create the core gameplay loop of the slime using HP to attack but if the bullet hit the enemy, it will drop back on the floor where player can collect it to recover the HP that it lost.  

The Design of the Game

The Game Combat Design was base of the shoot-em-up and dungeon crawler mix from Binding of Isaac as we referenced that base gameplay but added our own risky and thrilling twist to it where while more player lose HP to attack, they will get stronger by gaining speed, attack, attack speed as well as the slime will get smaller. Furthermore, player cannot die by shooting as their HP will constantly stay at 1 if they kept attacking and not heal.  

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The idea of this combat design was to reward player for taking risk and balance that risk as they play the game and fall into a rhythm of using HP and then recovering HP as they dodge and attack enemies in the game. 

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The enemies I designed was to keep players on their toes as they fought and progress in the game, there are 2 basic mobs where one chases you periodically and damages player when they chase, another moves randomly and will shoot arrows at the player. There were 2 bosses I design to keep the experience and milestone the player's progression where the first had a dash attack and will shoot a barrage of fireballs at the player. The last boss was designed to only move left and right where it shoots a spread and sequences of slashes that came in varying sizes and speed at the player, with a pattern that changes once its HP reaches 50%. The boss provide an avenue of challenge and test the player's skills and buff they collected in that particular playthrough.

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The Game Flow was separated into 3 tiers which represent the environment from a snowy landscape to a burning castle to represent the slime's journey to the demon army. There are a total of 30 rooms where a challenge room represent a new rule to progress instead of just kill all enemies and wishing well screen is a room that let player select a buff out of 3 random choices.  We did this way to keep player occupied as they progress and act as a distraction from the normal loop  and also to act some sort exploration immersion with the changing environment to give a sense of progression. 

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- Reflection -

I think the core gameplay loop of the player using HP to attack and then running around the map to collect them to recover is high in potential as it is simple to learn but hard to master and can be enhanced by various ways and flexible to many new features. I think this game was also able to give that risky and thrilling experience in its gameplay and have its moment of being intense and flow-inducing in the gameplay.

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However looking back now with hindsight, I think there are  gaps and holes in the design that showed our inexperience, particularly the scope as since there were only 2 mobs who each only had one basic action, fighting them eventually got 2 tiresome especially as it is a roguelite game where permadeath is core feature. The lack of variability in the mobs and the levels made the experience of going rogue really subdued and the repetitiveness became boring instead of having that surprise of randomness. I also think 2 bosses were unnecessary especially with the fact that we only had one artist and instead of making 2, it would've been better to fuse their features together into one character.

 

I also think that the game could've been much shorter as there were too many repetitive rooms that rely on small changes to give a novel experience to players but most player started getting bored when reaching the 3rd tier as the impact of change was not strong enough to retain their attention.  In any case, if I were to change my design back, I think I would've adjusted it to be shorter but more eventful in the rooms or fights instead on focusing to have a lot of content and grind for gameplay that eventually become too repetitive

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©2022 by Wong Ying Fu. Proudly created with Wix.com

One of the core experience and gameplay concept I design for this game was to enhance and make sure that the player feel that they are actually fighting a robot. As many souls game use beast and monsters that have a conventional HP and need to deplete it to defeat it. To give the game a unique twist, I designed the enemies to only have a stagger bar and to defeat it, they must staggered the robot so that it will reveal its heart and only then they can be destroyed as an automaton unlike things that are alive is that robots will never get tired and will keep doing what it supposed to do unless its core component is damaged. 

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The focus in the combat gameplay experience and design was to  have that feeling of impact and grit in their attacks and when they get hit. We try to achieve this with myriad of stuff just to make the combat and the player hits to actually give out that feel of contact such as hitstop, hit vfx, sound effects, animation and camera shake, all of this to make sure player feel satisfied when hitting the enemy, especially during a parry.  

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