Triangle Survivors

Triangle Survivors is beginning attempts at making a Vampire Survivors style bullet hell in GB Studio. The biggest problem I faced was the actor limit of 10 on screen at a time which makes it very difficult to make a bullet hell with collectable items all over the screen. I started by implementing basic mechanics with collisions of the player projectiles and enemies as well as making the collectable circles "spawn" by using actors that hide themselves and randomly teleport to a new location after a certain time being hidden. This isn't entirely true to the game but I can't have a lot of collectables on the screen at once to give the arcade feel.

After that I experimented with the enemies pathing slightly varying so they wouldn't overlap each other chasing the player. In the end this was accomplished by having a timer script randomly select one of the enemies to cancel their current movement which would allow them to choose a more efficient path towards the player while the others would not. For the rest of the gameplay I messed around with tuning the values of movement speed, health, and some other stats to try and make the game more balanced.

For scene 2, I created a different kind of enemy that has only one health, a smaller hit box, and also fires projectiles back at the player. This builds the movement verb by giving the player more complex things to avoid while keeping the gameplay loop interesting. After that, it was mostly debugging which isn't entirely complete. The two main bugs that I can't find a source or good way around are 1.) the collectables will randomly teleport when they are already visible and should stay in place 2.) When the player is immune to damage after getting hit, the enemies are also immune. The first one I just can't find the logical problem for. The second is a work around to allow time for the UI to update the loss of a life as well as prevent the enemies from locking the player in place and killing them on the spot from one hit (projectiles follow the collision status of their source). Overall, I'm happy I was able to bring all the loose ends of the game into a finished product but was a little dissatisfied with the GB Studio limits in terms of making a more accurate version of this game.