ANDY VO
Game Designer, Programmer, and Artist
WURM HUNT
Overview
Wurm Hunt is a 2D Action Platformer game prototype where the player plays as a hunter wielding a magical throwing spear and takes on a single foe, the Wurm. The player can air dash as well as teleport to a thrown spear. Every time the player dies, they leave behind their spear and respawn as a new hunter with another spear while the Wurm recovers health. Damaging the Wurm can make it drop power-ups for the player.
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Design
My focus for this game was to create a fluid movement system and pair it with a simple action combat situation. The basic idea takes rough inspiration from Acid Nerve's game,Titan Souls, which is comprised only of boss fights and the player only has to worry about mastering the mechanics they were given from the very start of the game.
Movement
Movement was focused on the relations between 4 states:
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Running - Standard side-scroller movement. I used acceleration based movement to add a little bit of padding, but prioritized responsive movement.
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Jumping - I implemented a jump system similar to what one would find in a classic Super Mario game. The jump resembles a short-ranged jet pack, going up at a constant speed as long as the player holds the button, up to a limit. Once that limit passes or the player lets go, gravity takes over until the player hits the ground. I've always felt that this was the most responsive approach to a jump mechanic. The player can still maneuver side to side, of course.
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Air Dashing - Barring power ups, the player gets to dash in the air once in one of 8 directions. I felt this was better than something like a double jump since it allowed rapid movement in multiple directions, so the player had one more wildcard to play if they were caught in the air. Even better if they have multiple dashes enabled by power ups.
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Teleportation - An ace in the hole ability. If the player is within a certain range of a thrown spear, they can teleport to it. After a teleport, if the spear is stuck a wall, the player will hang from it, allowing them to jump and air-dash once more.
My intention was to give the player a simple set of options, each being limited and imperfect, but each being very precious to a critical moment. An experienced player would quickly figure out how to time and chain together each action to get themselves out of trouble.
Spears
The spear was made to be simple and straightforward. When thrown, the spear would travel in a very slight arc as impacted by gravity. The downside is that it could still be thrown very far. If the player threw it too far, they would have to traverse the level to get close enough to teleport to it and retrieve it. As a means to give newer players a bit of advantage and veteran players more tools to work with, the player leaves an extra spear in the map every time they die. This meant more attacks and more teleportation, an advantage I felt appropriate for a single burst prototype. Additionally, the player can use a spear to guard a hit from the Wurm, resulting with the spear being knocked out of the player's hand.
The Wurm
I wanted one simple enemy to get the player thinking about how to make the best use of their given mechanics. A common simple, but effective type of enemy for a 2D platformer is a type of worm enemy. These enemies typically just chase the player and can act as sort of a hindrance that force the player to reconsider movement and positioning. A couple of examples would be the Eater of Worlds in Re-Logic's Terraria, or the Magma Worm in Hopoo Games' Risk of Rain. As such, I designed the Wurm to slowly move its head towards the player and charge when it had the player in its sights. As it's health lowers, it moves slightly faster to put further pressure on the player. It was also a good feeling throwing the spear straight through the Wurm and hitting multiple of its segments.
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Technically speaking, the Wurm is essentially just a linked list of objects with a head node. The head node has all the AI functions attached to it, and all the children nodes just follow the node in front of it.
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Power Ups
These were put in as a little cherry on top to add interesting effects and abilities to the player. Things like boosting damage, throwing a "shadow spear" next to a normal one, increasing movement speed, etc. Similar to Risk of Rain's power ups, each one was designed to stack and to not conflict. By far, the most fun power up was one that allowed the player multiple air dashes for each level in that power up. The increasingly unrestricted, fast movement was thrilling for a lot of players.
Credits
All programming, art, and animation assets were done by me in GameMaker Studio 2. Sounds were made in bfxr (https://www.bfxr.net/) and music used came free to use from Darren Curtis (https://www.darrencurtismusic.com/).
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Download Link: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1vB1H_T-Je0qc_mKu5yFwGaNPoSodIa2P