Summary
Bloody Hell is a Metroidvania Bullet-hell game about an angel sent on a mission from God to eliminate Satan.
Development of the current iteration of Bloody Hell has been going on since August 2022 and will continue until we release it on Steam in January 2023. We are a team of 3 consisting of 2 designers (myself included) and 1 artist. Additionally, there are 3 others from a sound design studio called Syncontour.
Before this current iteration we have made other major design iterations and the game has changed a lot since then, on this page I'll give a look into the design process we went through.
My role throughout development has mainly been:
General Design
Level Design
Programming
Art & VFX
UX Design
Player/combat Feel
Very first prototype (development time: 3 days)
This was the very start of development, a good friend of mine made a bullet-hell rogue-lite game in 3 days. When seeing this, we both saw the potential to make this into a game we can finally release on Steam.
However, even though this prototype was already kind of fun and incredibly simple to make, we wanted to make it a lot more unique and special. There are a lot of games of this same genre out already, and we wanted to give a taste of what our design skills can offer to the table.
The thing we liked least about the prototype was the fact that it was a rogue-lite. Meaning, death was permanent and you had to restart every time with some new upgrades.
Iteration 1 (development time: 2 weeks)
For this iteration, we wanted to add a unique experience by adding the metroidvania genre and removing the rogue-lite/rogue-like genre entirely. The plan was to make a procedural open world and then have dungeons similar to ones you find in games like Zelda, that were handmade instead of generated. However when we started developing, we quickly found out the limitations procedural generation in a metroidvania would bring us. The generation also quickly felt out of place and unnecessary.
Iteration 2 (development time: 8 weeks)
So after the previous iteration, we decided we wanted to completely focus on the handmade dungeons instead of on an additional generated open world. It was at this point that we decided to increase the team size and got 2 additional artists and 1 extra designer to help develop our game.
We wanted to make the game feel even more unique now that we were completely focussing on dungeons, since there are already a lot of dungeon themed games out there, and we wanted to stand out. This is why we decided to situate the game in Hell and to add interactable gore in the form of blood. This blood would be caused by the player damaging and killing enemies and could then be used by metroidvania abilities like being able to dive into blood.
The combat felt satisfying and the game felt really polished! However, there was one main flaw we had during the design and that was due to the limitation we set for ourselves we didn't want to add upgrades for the player because of time constraints. This ended up making the whole game not feel like a metroidvania cause of the lack of collectables, progression and exploration. This caused the entire game to be boring and bland.
Current Iteration (development time: 5 months)
To fix the design flaws made in the previous iteration, we set 2 design pillars for ourselves: Satisfying Combat & Exploration. This time we would add player upgrades in the form of Blood Vials with a system reminiscent of Hollow Knight's Charm system. Also, we focussed a lot more on finding secrets and upgrades for things like health.
What we had to be careful about during designing was to not over scope, this game would be very content focussed cause if we wanted to add extra levels we would also have to add new upgrades, enemies, environments, story, bosses, etc. To help with this, we spent some time developing tools & Shaders to help with the speed of creating new content. This has proven extremely useful and is speeding up our current development time massively.
To really emphasize the metroidvania aspect in our game we have had to redo the way we did level design in our previous iteration, it was up to me to make the levels and thus a spent a good amount of time studying games in similar genre's like Hollow Knight. This research gave me good insight in how to offer the player choice and how to guide the player to the next big thing even though the world is nonlinear.
So far the playtests that we have done have given us incredibly positive feedback and excitement, and we are very proud of how current development is going so far.
Examples of shaders I made to speed up the development process and make everything look more distinct and unique.
Examples of old Level Designs for "Iteration 2"
Examples of Level Designs I've made for the current iteration of our game.
Screenshot of how the current in game map looks for the Playable Demo of the current iteration.
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