Week 11b- Game Discussions
Considering the game that we are working on, I thought it would be appropriate to cover the mechanics and inner workings of a game from the same genre as Hell Riders. For this, I will discuss a couple of games for different parts of Hell Rider's mechanics:
Ult Generation- Deltarune
As discussed in the MVP document, the player can generate . This idea of building up powerful actions was inspired by a similar mechanic in the RPG Deltarune by Toby Fox. In this game, the player defends against attacks in quick bullet-hell minigames by controlling their soul to avoid incoming bullets. Unlike its predecessor Undertale however, there is an additional mechanic in the form of the Tension meter. This meter builds up Tension Points (TP for short) whenever the player narrowly dodges bullets in these bullet hell sections. Once the meter is filled up enough, the player can unleash stronger attacks and abilities
Image From: Tim Ronan, 2019 https://www.keengamer.com/articles/previews/deltarune-preview/
Showing this narrow dodge, the player briefly gets a flash/outline appear next to the character as they move around to signify their close escape with damage.
*Note: Image above was added later in development than week 11
In Hell Riders, we will have a similar system for narrowly dodging attacks. As shown with the image above, the player flashes a white outline whenever they narrowly avoid an enemy.
Pseudo Random Distribution- Dota 2
Taking a break about talking about bullets, I should discuss a little about how some of the more complicated enemies work.
Take the Tormentor. In the game it has two different attacks- one attack where it fires a barrage a bullets at the player, and another where they fire homing rockets. In a more simple setup, the designer would have the enemy either alternate between the two in a fixed pattern or have them randomly pick one from the other with a dice roll. Now the game does use random distribution, but it does so with a little twist I picked up from my thousands of hours playing DOTA 2 with Pseudo Random Distribution.
DOTA 2 is a MOBA where players take control of heroes with unique sets of abilities and work together to destroy the enemy team's "Ancient". Some of its heroes and items possess abilities that have a random chance of hitting. However a good chunk of those abilities don't have truly random effects as to add a level of consistency to them and make them more competitively viable. To do this, they have a system where whenever the ability fails to activate on a roll, the chance of activating it on the next roll increases and continues to do so until it is successfully rolled- whereupon it resets.
Here is an example taken from the game (Liquipedia, 2025 https://liquipedia.net/dota2/Random_Distribution) the item Skull Basher's Bash has a 25% chance to stun the target as a melee hero. On the first attack, however, it only has an ~8.5% probability to bash. Each subsequent attack without a bash increases the probability by ~8.5%. So on the second attack, the chance is ~17%, on the third it is ~25.5%, etc. After a bash occurs, the probability resets to ~8.5% for the next attack. These probabilities average out so that, over a moderate period of time, Bash effect procs nearly 25% of the time.
Back to Hell Riders, I have implemented a simpler version of the system with a variable I call Threat. Back to the Tormentor and shown above, when they roll for attacks, they roll 1d6 (or choose a random number between 0 and 5). To activate the missile attack, it must roll a 7 (6 in the code) or higher, which is statistically impossible for it to do with a standard system. In this system however, whever it does not roll for missiles, the enemy increases its threat value by 1, adding its threat value to the number rolled and allowing to now potentially roll a 7 or higher. This continues until it finally performs this attack, whereupon its threat value resets to 0 and the process starts all over again.
Bullet Hell Hitboxes- Tohou
When designing a bullet hell game, it is good to look at what works with some of the most successful ones in the genre. Which is where I will briefly discuss the Tohou series. Compared to Hell Riders, the Tohou games possesses a lot more happening on the screen- simply because this game really does bring the hell in bullet hell.
Here's a fun game, find the player in the picture above^ (Jaimers, 2016, screenshot from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AY7QEEnSGVU)
It is important to note that the player in the image above has not taken damage despite how it may look with the bullets all over them. The reason to why is rather simple- their collision is extremely small.
Image: Tohou Wiki, 2023 https://en.touhouwiki.net/wiki/File:CharacterHitboxSizes.png
Looking at the image above, you can see the sprite of the player and the sprite of their actual hitbox shown by the coloured box on them, what this allows is for the player to navigate those extremely busy screens without a single hit- giving the player sense of overcoming seemingly insurmountable odds with not even a scratch.
The player's hitbox is so small that it is even a meme that fluctuates around the game's community, commenting on how Tohou players could dodge that
With regards to Hell Riders, I had to implement this to get have a similar feel exist. While I do not have the hit box as small, it is still smaller than the size of the sprite. The outer boxes being the collision to award the player with ult charge and the maller boxe being their actual hit box for receiving damage .
Additionally, just like in Deltarune, narrowly dodging bullets in Tohou games awards the player with additional points the game calls "grazes".
