TwinSync

Overview

This was a University game jam project which I worked on for 5 days in January 2021 in a team of 2, where we both did the programming and art.

The theme of this game jam was "Stronger Together" so we decided to create a twin-stick shooter where the player is in control of two characters simultaneously who have to fight their way through a series of waves of enemies. These characters are stronger the closer they are to each other and this affects their damage output, the range of their attacks, the speed of their attacks and their fire rate. The closeness bond is referenced in-game as "linking". The characters are linked if the circles around them are present and the strength of the link can be determined by the colour: with green being maximum strength and red being minimum. The game is not lost if one of the two characters dies, however, it increases in difficulty as enemies are scaled to take into account the link bonus.

Shooting and Items

The first system I worked on in this game was the player shooting. Each character can shoot in a straight line in each of the four cardinal directions. Both of the characters start off with their own unique projectile with the mage getting a fireball and the archer getting an arrow. The fireball deals area-of-effect damage on contact with an enemy while the arrow starts with a pierce count of one to distinguish the two weapons. 

Between waves, the player is represented with a choice of three items and these items can be used to change the projectile of each character. Projectiles can be swapped at these points so the archer has the fireball or the mage has the arrow and they can also be upgraded to become poison-tipped, accelerating or seeking. Poison projectiles add a lingering poison effect to enemies that they hit and I introduced a flickering effect to represent this on enemies where they are tinted and untinted green for the duration of the effect.  Accelerating projectiles move with a constant acceleration instead of a constant velocity and take their acceleration into account when dealing damage. This makes them useless at close range but incredibly deadly at a distance. Seeking projectiles home in on targets, making it easier to hit enemies which approach the player from a diagonal direction. 

In addition to the default two weapons, a third weapon type exists in the game called the shuriken. It has a very unique style of play where the player fires a shuriken and the shuriken will be released from the player going in a circular path for a full revolution. In the final jam version of the game, this weapon is a run killer as I over-nerfed it, due to this weapon being able to be used as a shield if its pierce count is greater than 0. 

The other items in the game either give the players simple stat increases such as increased damage, increased movement speed etc. or they improve the link. The link improvement items are: the magnet, which forces the secondary character to follow the primary character at all times, maximising the link bonus; the aura boost (necklace), which increases the distance at which the link bonus takes effect; and the soul link (chain), which prevents the player from shooting when unlinked in exchange for a large damage boost. These three items can be picked up several times throughout the game. picking up the same item multiple times amplifies its effect, however, picking up a different link improvement item when you already have a link improvement causes you to lose the original link improvement as these items are too strong when paired up.