The Bunker
ROLE
Lead Designer, Developer, Programmer, Art
DESCRIPTION
The Bunker is a side-scroller puzzle adventure space western with deck-building, RPG-like combat. You play as a space cowboy partnered with a United-Nations-like organization to save a dying world that has been riddled with the disease of climate change. However, rivals, bandits, and monsters stand in your way. You must find your way through the bunker to find all the seeds, thus ensuring this planet's plantlife lives on.
Gameplay
Design
When it comes to designing a game, I usually like to center a theme around a game mechanic I think is really cool and flexible, but when it came to The Bunker, the theme really inspired my main game mechanics. With the theme being an "Optimistic Space Western" as a way to contrast modern space westerns that have some pessimistic elements, I thought it would benefit the game to have mechanics that work alongside narrative and story. Puzzles, dialogue boxes, and exploration elements were a must in order to make the game stand out. I really wanted to bring out the idea that this game could have a positive ending; that the space cowboy was here to bring hope to a desolate land.
Two main mechanics came out of this: room-based side-scrolling and a deck-building combat system.
Room and Explortation System
This room-based side-scrolling allowed me to create interactable items in each room, or even let me give each room different behaviors or puzzles. When the player collides with a room, the camera moves to that room. This same collision event can be used to trigger other events, such as battles or a change in background values.
Room objects with their variables
Best of all, this room system works in unison with the combat system. Each room checks for a certain number of enemies and can keep track of the number of enemies as the battle goes on. When the battle is triggered, the room checks that there are 3 enemies to fight, spawns a Battle Manager object and starts the battle. The battle system required its own bit of design, as it is basically a game within a game.
Battle System
I decided how the battle system would work through a few simple sketches. I decided what it would look like, how it would work, and how many kinds of actions to have.
While paper prototyping, I decided that a turn-based system worked best and that the player should have access to 4 different kinds of actions. But simply giving the player 4 actions seemed boring, so I added a bit of randomization, which led me to create a kind of deck-building system. Later, I added cards to chests, which allowed the player to grow their deck!
The enemy also went through a few iterations. Originally, the enemies would all have multiple actions, but this went way beyond my scope. To keep things simple, I made it so they all shot bullets at the player, but charged up a more powerful bullet every time they attacked. This actually worked perfectly with the card system, as one of the player's available actions stopped an enemy from attacking, and thus from charging. It just worked together very well and resulted in a tactical strategy that helped the player avoid damage, so I kept it.
Original sketch of the battle system.
I like to go over my ideas critically as if I am pitching the idea to myself. This led me to push healing outside of combat in order to make exploration important for combat, essentially making a small game loop.
Final Battle System: Here you can see the player's health bar that drains as they are hit, their drawn cards, and the enemies. One is fully charged and about to release a strong bullet.