“We, The One” is a poetic 2D bullet hell game where the player must dodge endless enemies to get home. The player starts off as a lonely brown circle, but he or she can collect other circle friends on their way to help them reach home more easily. There is no direct way of returning fire against enemies, but the player can move close and defeat enemies with a charge attack instead. It’s completely up to the player to decide whether or not to go it alone or try to bring everyone home. The game was made in Unity 3D and coded in C#. It was created by a team of four people within 48 hours for Global Game Jam 2019.
I was the team lead for this project and handled majority of the programming and design of the game. I worked on the game mechanics, visual effects, and overall architecture of the game. The goal was to design a game that would give off a warm feeling for successfully collecting friends and a more subdued response when alone. I decided to use the visual and audio feedbacks to dynamically relate this effect to the player. Our musician composed an adaptive soundtrack which included 7 separate instruments. An instrument would fade in every time the palyer found a friend, and it would fade away if a friend was lost. The result would be a fantastic musical piece if you managed to collect all six friends. In addition to this, another programmer from a different team showed me how to use post processing effects to give the game a lovely bloom effect. I was able to use this to provide an orange glow everytime a friend was collected as well as the audio cue. It also helped to provide a way to fade the screen in and out to give the game a smooth transition between scenes.
We did not have an artist on our team, and one of the diversifiers, or mini themes, was coincidentally using only simple shapes in the game. This made the design process kind of fun because I had to consider the artistic appearance of the game as we were putting it together. Another cool thing about the game was the unintended methaphorical deep meaning it ended up having. We made it such that the close range attack was less effective if the player had friends, which could be interpreted as saying that it is easier to keep people away from you when you’re alone. The warmer and more joyous feeling for completing the game with all the friends can also be seen as saying that home is who you enjoy being with.
You can check out the game jam website for our game here which includes a download link for the game.
