H-Fuse
H-Fuse is a retro inspired shoot 'em up with only one health bar that everything shares.
Players blast an endless onslaught of alien threats for a high score. Players have to be aware of how much HP is left in the bar, since it is only when there is 1 HP left that both the player and enemies can be defeated.
Made for the GMTK Game Jam 2019.
Engine: Unity
Team: Solo development
Development Process
Ideation
I spent the first 3.5 hours of the jam brainstorming ideas. I jotted down any idea, totaling close to 80. Then I mocked up each of the 10 ideas that were most in scope for the two days. From those, I chose the one that seemed the most fun and interesting from a design perspective.
Revving the Engine
At first I thought I would use Godot, since it's quite good at making 2D games and it would be nice to brush up on my Python. After starting the Godot project, I realized that picking Godot would shift my priority from solving design problems to solving technical problems. I wanted to use this jam to hone my design skills more, so I switched to Unity
Who to Fight
For the sake of variety, I wanted to have more than one enemy type. I tried to think if there was anything more interesting than just 3 different bullet patterns. I really liked the idea of an enemy that periodically adds health to the health bar. I thought it would give players interesting choices while tying back to the global health bar.
Clearly telegraphing what was going on was the challenge. I gave the healing squid enemies a Red Cross-like plus sign on their heads and a special animation before they are about heal. This wasn't quite enough, so I made sure to give the healing action a distinct sound effect. The sound is a lower pitched version of the sound that plays when the player heals themselves to full, since the squid only heals one at a time.
Everything Serves the Design
After I got the basics of the game up and running with temp art (collision, enemy spawning and behavior, bullet pooling, etc.), I put in the global health bar and enemy death. I played around with it and it didn't feel good, at all. Even with a massive health bar, I found myself constantly forgetting how much HP there was.
Inspired by Downwell, I decided to use the art style to solve this problem. The art style would effectively be monochromatic pixel art, but I wanted all the white to transition to orange as the health bar depleted. I wanted the central quirk of the game, the singular health bar, to bleed into every other aspect of the game.
So I delved into pixel art mode after hours of design and programming. And it made a world of difference; plastering the health bar information on everything worked well. I could always tell how much health was left and the game was coming together.