Firecracker

Playthrough of Firecracker

Firecracker is a psychedelic top-down, twin-stick bullet hell shooter for PC in which you cannot shoot bullets but only reflect them. I worked on the game as Gameplay Designer and Programmer for the duration of 8 weeks. I was responsible for conceptualizing, iterating on, and balancing core gameplay systems as well as level design and programming various basic systems in Unity. I worked on this game in collaboration with Jasper Oprel and Julia Emmink.

These screenshots were taken in-game.

Our goal was to create a very unique shoot’ em up. We were inspired by traditional Asian fan dances and integrated this into our game by turning the player weapon into a fan. To encourage the player to make slower, more elegant movements, instead of the twitchy playstyle often seen in shoot’ em ups, we reward them for turning the fan slowly, letting it stay open for longer, giving them more coverage, and punish them for flicking the controls, making the fan close quickly. Because we only gave them the ability to reflect enemy bullets and took away their ability to shoot, the fan’s coverage became crucial. This also made positioning very important. Bullets and enemies are coming at the player from all sides, so to still give them enough space to move around we designed each level as an arena. They have to think ahead and tactically chose which bullets to reflect first to not end up in a literal bullet hell. By implementing a bullet time when coming dangerously close to enemy projectiles, we still gave the player a way to dodge/escape when they’ve made a mistake and not punish them for it immediately.

→ Link to itch.io page ←