Captain SHMUP

Spring 2019

This was the final project in a class that was meant to teach the finer points of designing games in groups. It’s a boldly colored, high contrast space shooter. Our goals for this game included wanting to capture the essence of 80’s action films and alien space battles. We were given the choice of “delicate” or “eternal” as a theme. We chose delicate and made the player character die in one hit. It is very difficult to beat this game.

All three of us developers only had minor programming skills at the time, so I used this project to gain some other experience, namely creating art and sound. I tried my hand at every role in the process of developing this game and especially thrived in the sound design/composition role.

Team Size

Dev Cycle

Five weeks

Softwares I Used

Phaser CE

BFXr

Photoshop

Ableton

Git

My Contributions

Sound Design

I coded the sounds and music to all trigger at the right times. I took the main music track and cut it into four pieces, each piece starting at the beginning of a checkpoint so that when the player dies and has to restart, the track begins from the right point. This ensures that the main track and the gameplay always line up perfectly.

The Phaser framework has limited functionality for implementing sounds and music, but there is enough that I was able to make it work.

Full Gameplay Music:

Menu Music:

Boss Fight Music:

Game Over Music:

Game Win Music:

Composition & Sound Engineering

Music

The main music track for this game is my magnum opus. It is seven minutes of 80’s synth rock glory. I created a restriction for myself and the team to make this game playable to the end in the span of one song. I composed the track with clear tone breaks at four regular intervals so it could be implemented modularly as the backbone of the game within the checkpoint system.

The menu song is a slower, more muted companion to the main track and serves to let the player adjust to synth sounds before the gameplay begins.

The game over track is supposed to evoke the cold emptiness of space. The boss track is supposed to be frantic and feverish making the player feel chaotic and stressed.

The win track is meant to be a very silly, almost slapstick celebration track.

Sound Effects

I used the program Bfxr to create the lo-fi sound effects for this game. I made sure that each one of the different weapon sound effects were on a slightly different frequency spectrum so that they didn’t overlap and muddy the sound during gameplay. The weapon pickup sound was inspired by the old Streets of Rage money pickup sound effect.

Programming

The mechanic that I programmed, aside from the implementation of the sounds, music, and art assets, was the shield overlay. I made the shield add one health and appear over the player on pickup, and disappear when the player gets hit. I also took a team member’s weapon implementation and copied it to make some of the other weapons, tweaking the code slightly to make the weapons feel different.

Ideation & Prototyping

The name of the game was my idea, almost right out of the gate. I also had the idea to make the final boss be a huge robot space octopus. Most of the ideas for this game were collaborative, and we all worked really hard together on this game. Our aesthetic design pillar was 80’s action, and the narrative, if it had fit into the 5 week dev cycle, would have been silly and awesome.

Art

I created pixel-style elements and environment pieces for this game. I am most proud of the “rambo space octopus” enemy. I am also very proud of the boss ”Zza” and the modular “robo-tentacles.” I also made some bullet designs and an animation for the charge-up of the railgun. The pickup sprites I made were the single letter trays inspired by the weapon pickups in the Metal Slug series.

Additionally, I modified some other pixel art that we purchased for use. I took some of our images and made a debris field out of them to scroll in a parallax fashion.

Play the Game

Play on Itch.io

Website by my awesome wife.