GMTK 2023!

Well, this was a fun one. I ran through several ideas for the theme Roles Reversed. Below is a non-exhaustive list of ideas that I thought of or saw elsewhere, each of them used the 'Role Reversal' as a core gameplay mechanic. 

• A Roguelike where you are the boss and build the dungeons for the player to fight through. Try to kill the player. (Would probably be way too hard to make).
• A Deckbuilder Roguelike where you play as the card effects, think Paper Mario TTYD with moves having action commands, each unique card has a unique minigame.
• An arcade survival shooter where you play as the bullets and need to redirect them into enemies and players.
• You money-making game where your goal is to lose money?
• Bowling but you’re the pins.
• A clicker game where you are avoiding the pointer.
• A cooking sim but you are the customer.
• A bullet hell where you make the bullet patterns
• You don’t play the game, the game plays you.
• Dating Sim where your goal is to be hated by as many people as possible.
• A platformer where the character auto-runs/jumps and you have to control the entire level to make sure they don't fall off or get hit.
• A puzzle game where you move the enemy pieces into different places before your roles switch and you need to traverse what  you created

Core Idea

I landed on the idea of a Bullet Hell where you're trying to run into all of the projectiles, essentially blocking or parrying them from hitting something else! It creates a gameplay loop where you need to figure out the most efficient way to move and position enemies before the projectiles fly out of your reach. I shortly came up with the name Bullet Happy afterward, though Bullet Heaven was a close second.

Experimentation

I experimented a lot with this game jam entry, especially with game juice! I used a lot of tweening and procedural animations as opposed to what I usually do. Combined with a smaller color palette and my usual pixel-perfect graphics and the game has an interesting modern retro art style. Development was a lot smoother compared to my prior game jam entries too.

Design

Design-wise, I wanted to keep the levels very simple so players could focus a lot more on the block mechanic, the game gives you a lot of time to get used to the movement and gameplay loop before throwing harder levels at you! The game doesn't start getting challenging until Level 7, I think.