APOLLON 88
TRAILER
overview
Apollon 88 is a 2D Top-Down, survival, shooter game that I released on steam as a solo developer in June 2020. You play as 88, where your goals are to survive by destroying the one who hunts you.
Currently, this game has around 30k downloads and has an 84% very positive rating over 58 reviews.
This game includes...
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High Score system with combo mechanics to motivate the player on chaining kills
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Combo rank that provides points based on how well players do in staying alive while destroying enemies.
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Pixelated art on each environment that contains the player, enemies, obstacle, UI, etc
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Various weapons where each of them has different stats in terms of fire rate, damage, bullet spawned
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Modular wave spawner that spawns various enemies based on set time intervals.
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Each weapon has its own bullet and sound, with camera shake to land a punchy vision
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Ravenous hunters which have a different movement speed, health respectively
Behind the scenes
Weapon System
The task was to ensure that the player needs a reason to switch between different weapons. I give them different weapons where one of them is the default with base damage and fire rate. Other has multiple bullet spawn for low fire rate. Lastly a quickfire rate but low damage. This is also fit for doing combo as by keep shooting to enemies, It made sure that the chain is not lost but that means that the player has to be cautious as enemies wouldn't die easily.
Combo Ranking System
Inspired by Devil May Cry Combo and Scoring systems. The combo system allows players to build up their combo bar by destroying enemies consecutively without receiving damage. As the combo rank went up, the score points that players received will increase based on the rank. Also, there is a duration bar that depletes through inactivity. Unable to damage an enemy within the duration will completely reset the combo bar. This prevents the player from running away from encounters.
Wave Spawner
I implemented a wave system for the game to automatically spawn enemies based on the conditions that I placed. It contains the amount of enemies to be spawned in a wave, the time intervals to spawn the next wave, and what type of enemy can be spawned. Moreover, placing multiple wave spawn points allows the game to spawn enemies based on the player's distance. It makes sure enemies will not spawn near the player.
Level Design
The challenge was to make sure that the player has more mobility in moving places but feeling tense or relax in different places. I had a various obstacle in the level where some corner area has a tight spot where the middle has loose space giving a much-relaxed state for the player.
Art
This was designed while in beta. I had some experience in doing pixel art in other project so it was less troublesome since this time I plan it by drawing it on a piece of paper while getting feedback from others. The task was to make sure that the arts fit well not only on each character but also on the environment itself.
