SHMUP
COOP
2D
MAGICAL GIRL
NARRATIVE TWIST
⏱️ One week
👥Team of 10
⚙️Unity
Uncannycal Girls is a two-player cooperative shmup (shoot-'em-up) where both players take control of magical girls, able to fuse together to become stronger, but revealing a more gruesome appearance, helping them defeat a visibly hostile spaceship fleet.
🙋♂️ What I did :
-Defining the core mechanics
-Making storyboards & presentations
-Level/wave design
-Defining enemies types & patterns
-Balancing the game
-Creating a narrative twist
🧩 What I've learned :
-Working as two level designers on the same level & how to communicate more efficiently with a big team.
Game design
We were two Game Designers on the team, we worked together on defining the mechanics and enemies types, before splitting the work for the level design. For this exercise we were tasked with making a 3 minutes cooperative SHMUP, which quickly made us thought about being able to fuse together as the main mechanic.
a) Our vision
Force players to synchronise for fusing
at the right time
Make players question who they are truly playing, and if their intentions are good.
What we wanted
How we've done it
Add strong enemies beatable only when fused and narrow paths that require to split.
Give a gruesome appearance to the fusion, have an anticlimactic final where players slaughter innocent aliens.
b) Early development gameplay storyboard I made in collaboration with one of the game artists
c) In game
Individual form
This form allows players to dodge projectiles and obstacles more easily, but it lacks firepower and health.
If hit by a projectile you are out of combat until your mate revive you by flying near you ! If you are both out of combat it's game over!
Taking this form is necessary to pass narrow terrains.
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Fused form
While fused both players must move in the same direction to go at full speed. This form is tankier and stronger, but easier to hit and too big to pass narrow terrains.
If you are hit three times it's game over, but you can split and fuse again after a short delay to recover your health.
Taking this form is necessary to beat the strongest enemies.
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Winning the game involves finishing a single 3 minutes long level, the game has no checkpoints.
Level design
As we were going to be two working on the same level, we decided to first, both do a single half of the level on "paper" in Miro, to have some metrics, before showing it to the other.
Then we both reviewed each other's level parts before starting the implementation in Unity with a tool made by our programmers, used to create enemy waves.
As the level needed to serve our game pillars I tried to create sections that continuously encouraged players to switch between both forms, before ending with an anticlimactic final to make players question their actions.
a) Early metrics I've done for Individual & fused form
b) Short level design part on Miro (the onboarding)
Read from bottom to top
c) In engine implementation
Level design implementation was what took us most of our time as game designers during this project. It was made using a tool created by one of our programmers.
Elements of level design are not placed directly in the scene, instead we're using a wave system, each wave appearing at a precise timing (it's only paused when a mini-boss appears, until beaten)
Each pink dot seen in the video is the spawn location of a predefined enemy or obstacle, while blue lines are spline used for some enemies' patterns.
d) Complete level walktrough