Slowdown Showdown Development Blog

A blog chronicling the development of Slowdown Showdown, my first video game project.

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Conclusion

Thank you for reading through this blog. If you’re looking at this post first, scroll down to find the beginning. Although both Slowdown Showdown and even this blog were created for class assignments, I’m glad I could share something I made with you.

For the professor reading this,

This is obviously a strange post to put in a school project. I figure if I went through all this work to document my game I may as well share it with people. I’ll be leaving this blog up. Though I doubt I will, maybe I’ll get a person or two to read it and feel inspired.

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Call to Action

Hopefully, if you’ve read through this entire blog, you at least have some motivation to do something creative. If you want to make a game of your own you can do it. If you want to make anything you can do it. I hope that my story about my first attempt at making something ignited a fire in you as well. If this is the first post you’re reading from me, I do hope you go to the beginning of my blog and read about my experience in full. 

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Post Mortem

I am incredibly proud of this project. Though it’s not exactly what we thought it was going to be going into it, I am still happy with how it turned out. Though a biased opinion, I believe that our game was the best game created in the intro to game design course for Fall 2018.

I learned a lot from this project. I had gone from knowing nothing about pixel art to creating an entire game in it. There were times when I was stressed because I didn’t know how to make the American frontier in pixel art. There was even a time where I was considering changing the entire setting of the game just because I couldn’t make the art look nice. I’m glad I was able to figure it out in the end.

Nathan and I created something that I will always remember. Even if it’s not the best thing in the world, it’s still the first game I ever made. That alone makes it special to me.

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Trailer

This is the trailer I created for our game after production had finished. This marked the end of development for us, and the final game was shown to our class.

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Final Development: Level Design

For our first level, the player must defeat all enemies so that they can advance to the next level. Nathan wanted this level to be rather simple because is is where the player will start playing the game. It’s just the player vs. the enemies with no special gimmick.

As part of the story, I designed this level the be the desert area. The antagonist would drop the player here to try and get rid of him. The player would then escape and start heading up where there is more grass and, eventually, civilization.

The second level is our biggest and most impressive level. It is also my personal favorite level. The objective of this level is to destroy all of the gatling guns to unlock the gate and progress to the saloon. Nathan once again did a great job when designing this level so that there are always enemies around  to worry about. He also made sure to give the player some extra protection when he asked for the crates to be made.

For the environment design, I wanted this level to more green. I figured the town would be out of the desert and in a more fertile area. There is a large forest to the south because there was originally a level between levels 1 and 2 that would have taken place in a forest.

The third level is the final level of our game. It is the most unique level because it features a singular boss rather than a group of enemies. Nathan originally had this level be almost twice the size so that you could run around more freely. I decided to shrink the level so that the camera doesn’t pan, and both the player and the boss remain on screen the entire fight.

Throughout development I knew I wanted the final fight to take place in the saloon. I wasn’t sure for a while if I was going to be able to make it, but I pushed hard at the end to make it work.

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Final Development: Other Assets

This is a sprite sheet for some of the miscellaneous objects I created for Slowdown Showdown.

Originally, our game was titled Bullet Time. I thought that title was fairly generic, so I decided to come up with a new name. The name I decided on was Slowdown Showdown. Surprising, huh? It’s cheesy, but at least Nathan got a laugh out of it too.

The crates I created for the second level. We decided to give the player cover as it was pretty difficult to get through that section of the level alive. I made damaged versions as the crate will eventually get destroyed if hit with enough bullets.

Nathan was nice enough to program a turret for us so that we would have some enemy variety. It was difficult thinking of what a turret could turn into in a western setting, but I settled on an old gatling gun.

We actually decided on adding the blood animation pretty late in development. Up until then, we had no feedback to tell when an enemy or the player was hit by a bullet. When we put the animation in the game, we forgot to make the last frame disappear so the blood would stay in the environment. We both liked the mistake so much we kept it in the final game.

The dynamite was created to destroy the gatling guns. It gave the player a secondary attack option, and we decided to allow players to use it on the boss as well.

When I created the bullets, I wanted them to stand out of the background so players would have a better time dodging them. I also wanted the colors to be color coated so that players would know which bullets were theirs.

Lastly, I created an explosion for when the dynamite hit an enemy. I know it’s really simple, but this explosion is one of the favorite parts of the entire project.

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Final Development: Environment

Once I fleshed out how to make tile sets, I was able to make multiple varied environments. While the outdoor environments are palette swaps of one another, the third level is completely new because it takes place indoors. Also, I had to create different props for each of the environments as well. 

Some of the assets, such as the railroad tracks, never made it to the final version of the game. We had planned to have much more than three levels, but time had gotten the better of us.

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Final Development: Characters

Once my character design was finalized, I was ready to animate my character. I had both idle and run animations for all for directions. In total, there are 32 sprites, 4 for each animation. There are also death sprites for each character. 

The character dressed in all brown, which is the original character I had created, became the base for the enemies rather than for the player. I decided to give the playable character a red bandana to make him stand out more. Also, I gave the main antagonist a curly mustache so you would know he’s evil.

As for the programming, Nathan was able to map each direction to the corresponding animation. For the enemy characters, we made the choice to have them only run right or left and never play the up or down animations. This was due to a bug we encountered within Construct that we couldn’t figure out.

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The Development Roadblock

About halfway between our start time and our deadline, we hit a development roadblock. Looking back on it now, it was mainly because I was being immature.

One night while I was working on the game, I lost hours of work. Yes, I know, always save your work because you might lose it. I thought I had saved it but I had lost track of time. The lost work made me lose a lot of motivation. I didn’t want to go back and redo what I had already done, so I didn’t.

Nathan had his Capstone to focus on the same semester, so he didn’t notice that my side of development had slowed that much.

Eventually, I stopped being a baby and went back to working. When you are developing a video game, or making anything creative, it won’t always be smooth sailing. Things will always get better, however; so don’t let one stupid mistake ruin the project.

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Continued Development: Gameplay

As I began creating the finalized assets for the game, Nathan had his own problems to deal with. Unlike the template that we were building from in Construct 3, our enemies needed to move AND shoot. Not only that, our enemies needed to stop moving once they got within a certain range of the player as well. You do shoot guns from a distance after all. Nathan was able to code out AI enemies to do just that! In addition, they wouldn’t run into objects such as fences or buildings either.

The next major mechanic to be implemented was the time-slowing mechanic. To do this, Nathan created a system where the entire game slowed down at the press of a button. And when I say the entire game, I mean the entire game. It was at this point we realized that we couldn’t have music or sound because those would be affected by the time slowing as well. 

Later in development, we found out that the time slowing mechanic also affected animation speed. To fix this issue, Nathan would speed up the animations by over 100x whenever time was slowed.

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Continued Development: Artwork

Weeks had passed since I first started to work in pixel art. The artwork I was creating was already leagues better compared to the first assets I had created. At this point in development, I decided to scrap the work I had done and recreate new assets now that I had a better skillset.

This image was created to show off the final art style of Slowdown Showdown. It was used as part of a presentation where Natan and I presented our game to the rest of our class for the first time. I was thrilled with how well the artwork was being received and gained newfound motivation to make our game even better.

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Pixel Art Process

Because this project was my first experience working with pixel art, I had to first teach myself how to create in pixels. I created all of my assets in Photoshop CS6 with the help of tutorials that I had found online.

Below is a sampling of the tutorials I used when teaching myself pixel art:

Hopefully these tutorials and lessons can be of help to anyone else trying to learn pixel art and or create their own game.

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Early Development: Gameplay

While I was creating the concepts for my art assets, my partner Nathan was creating the base of our game in Construct 3. Construct 3 has templates that you can use to create your game, and one of the templates is for a top-down shooter. Conveniently, this same template is also end product of the tutorial that we had finished to familiarize ourselves with the software.

While the Construct 3 version of this base has a marine fighting ghosts, my partner had found placeholder assets for our cowboy enemies. At this point we had working movement, aiming, shooting, ai that moved towards the player, a health bar, and a reset upon death.

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Early Development: Artwork

Slowdown Showdown wasn’t just the first time I had done artwork for a game, it was also the first time I had ever tried to do pixel art. When production of the game first began, I knew I would need to create multiple different characters and have them be animated. I figured it would be more time effective to create simple pixel sprites that I could palette swap.

These are the first sprites that I created for the game. I wanted to create the main character first so that I could then match the art style of the world around it.

Similarly, this is the first environment I created for the game. I wanted to create a tile map that had sand, cracked dirt, rocks, grass, and a few props. Later in development, as my skills with pixel art evolved, I would change the style of both the characters and the environment.

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Research and Inspiration

We didn’t want our top-down shooter to be in a stereotypical sci-fi setting. based on a recommendation from my partner’s roommate at the time, we decided to base our game in a western setting.

For my artwork, I was inspired by the game, Westerado Double Barreled. There are not many examples of games with pixel art set in a western setting. Westerado was great reference when trying to figure out how to simplify my environment and characters into pixel art.

For the gameplay, we were inspired by Super Hot. We didn’t want to create a standard top-down shooter, so we added the ability to slow down time. We based this idea off of the game Super Hot, and tried to rework it into a different genre. Slowing down time made sense to use, as time seems to stand still when two cowboys have a stand off. 

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Game Engine

Slowdown Showdown was built in the Construct 3 engine. Construct 3 is a free, online game engine. For our intro to game design class, we were required to use this engine. Construct 3 allows for games to be made very simply with its easy to understand UI and helpful tutorials.

Want to give it a try? You can find Construct 3 here:

https://www.construct.net/en

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Game Design Document

Introduction:

This is the final game design document for Team Bullet Time. In this document we will be discussing the features and selling points of our game, Slowdown Showdown.

Description:

Slowdown Showdown is an exhilarating 2D shooter from the team of Nathan and Brandon. Featuring a prominent time manipulation mechanic, Slow Down Showdown combines bullet hell action with strategic movement. There are currently no shooting games featuring a 2D wild west setting and time manipulation.

MDA Breakdown:

Mechanics:

Our main game mechanic is linking the players movement to the speed of the game. When the player is not moving the game time slows down. When the player moves, the time returns to normal. The player is able to move and shoot.

Dynamics:

As the players learn the game and their grasp of the mechanics, the enemies will become more difficult, to ensure that the game doesn't become too difficult or too boring.

Aesthetics:

Our main Aesthetic is challenge. Our entire game’s design is based on giving the player a challenge. Another aesthetic featured in our game is fantasy. The player takes control of a character in a fantasy wild west setting.

Key Features:

Three playable levels

Working time slowing mechanic

Health bars for character and enemies

Cutscenes to relay the story

Boss level with unique boss enemy

Almost 200 events and nearly 50 hand-made sprites

Genre:

2.5D western shooter combining bullet hell mechanics and time manipulation

Characters:

Protagonist

Unnamed playable character. Wields a six shot revolver.

Antagonist

The protagonist’s old partner. He took your prize, left you for dead, and took control of the town.

Cowboys

These are all the minions of your old partner. They are the main enemy seen in each level.

Story Progression:

The player will advance through three levels in different regions. The difficulty will increase with each level and a new gatling gun enemy is shown in the second level. The boss level is at end of the game, where the player must face off against a difficult boss which will test how well the player has mastered the game’s mechanics.

Future Work Plans:

Our plans for the future would to be add more interaction between the player and the world, as well as make more diverse level designs. We also had some plans that were not acted on for more enemy types due to time constraints, such as a train or men on horses.