Design Ideas

Below is the overview (elevator pitch) + top down layout for the game (created for UT level design course). 

The premise is simple, like other boss rush games, there will be a boss in each level that the player has to defeat in order to advance to the next level. The combat will be grid based, dodging out of danger will involve moving out of the way of enemy attacks at the correct time and attacking at the best times.

Some design ideas I have in mind for the game include a gimmick that gives away the boss attack patterns at the beginning of the fight, making the battle more fair even for the first fight. I find that most boss rush games, when you don't know an attack pattern, there's a higher chance of dying to a move that you don't know how to react to. To balance this, we give away the pattern to the player before the fight, so the player knows how to appropriately react to it. This also means that we can make much more difficult patterns without the player thinking that the move was cheap and unfair, and that it was unknown (e.g. you fight past the first phase of a boss, and then all of a sudden there's a new move in the second phase that kills you. This isn't due to player error and feels unfair the first time.)

Controls are TBA, but there will be movement between grid cells, potentially rotation, potentially weapon swapping, currently thinking of a loadout with one dash weapon, one close range weapon, and one long range weapon, so that swapping is easy and you can get to any weapon with a single button press.

Roadmap 1

Since I have 6 weeks to complete a level, I can start out by just creating simple things mentioned in the class in a template level, with traps, keys, doors blocking progression, but get the mechanics of the game completed in that template level. I hope to maybe finish this much in 2-3 weeks, and then flesh out a simple boss fight in the 3-4 weeks after, if I put my mind to it this can be done.

I'll be updating a public trello board if anyone wants to see the progress: https://trello.com/b/2WXHqpbl/steel-soldier