Becoming Boo
Protect your coral against alien creatures as you swim endlessly in deep waters of an unknown planet
Becoming Boo is a 2D vertically scrolling shooter that takes place in an unknown planet. Player takes the control of an alien called Boo who must attach floating eggs to their special coral to protect it from invading creatures. In an endless mission the player must defend the coral by shooting enemies and covering the coral to survive and gain a high score.
Fact sheet
Genre
2D vertically scrolling endless shooter
Platform
WebGL, PC
Project Length
12 weeks
Engine
Unity
Team Size
2
Trailer
Responsibilities
Concept design
Player character controller implementation
Enemy design and implementation
Level design for the procedural systems
Asset implementation
Designed and implemented a tool to integrate procedural animation
Tuned and balanced gameplay iteratively to achieve the intended game feel and difficulty progression.
Project Gallery
Design Process
Project Description
Becoming Boo is developed as the practical part of my thesis for the Digital Games Bachelor of Arts Program in collaboration with an artist who provided all the art assets in the game. My goal with this project was to redesign an existing game I have worked on previously called Beelder, in order to improve the game feel and address other known the issues with that game.
Design approaches
Changing the concept to be able to provide a fresh new experience
Focused on improving the player character and kinesthetic feel of the game
Revised the enemy archetypes to improve the combat experience
Challenges
Being the solo hand-in developer to meet a tight deadline
Integrating a new system into the game's complex, intertwined systems
Providing a custom made tool to the artist to have the procedural animation
Balancing gameplay and tuning interrelated systems
Greatest achievement
Finished the project in time at a reasonable state
Improved the game in iterative steps by applying the feedback from the playtests
Outlook (with more time)
Sound design was a must but we couldn't fit it into the workload
Looking into improving the game's performance
Learning Objective/Outcome
Experience in working as a technical game designer
Expanding my knowledge in unity and development pipelines
Learning about iterative design processes, game feel and various design frameworks that applies to these subjects