Hi, I’m Adam “Gahlammon” Dachtera, team leader and main designer of Bullet Waste, here to tell you about the designing of our game.

Introduction

We’re currently approaching the release of the third demo of Bullet Waste. It will bring many changes to the core of our gameplay, for example a big rework of combat and arena structure. It will also introduce new enemies, new environments and reimagined training sequence, so there’s surely something to look out for.

But, today I’d like to focus on the game designing aspect. Let me share with you a little bit about what are the difficult parts of creating that kind of game that we’re making and why our mechanics are still not final after all this time. Then, I will tell you about some gameplay changes we’re working on to handle these problems. Interested? Okay then, let’s get to it!

The Core of Bullet Waste

Bullet Waste is a game that has been under development for over two years. Still, the mechanics you can see in our latest demo aren’t final. Why is that? Well, partially because it’s our first big project and we have no idea what the hell we’re doing. But also, the idea behind Bullet Waste is to combine many gameplay aspects that very few games put together. That’s why we have to act like pioneers, testing new solutions and analyzing how people react to them.

Many times people ask me “What is your game about”. Usually, my answer is “It’s a combination of a first person slasher and bullet hell, with arena-based level structure”. It’s pretty much the “core sentence” of this game, that all changes circle around. I will now extract the important terms from it. Let’s call them… “the core phrases”. I will replace word “Slasher” with “Melee”, as I like to do this when this word comes separately. The word “melee” simply doesn’t fit into the core sentence, but is a better term to describe what we’re trying to achieve. Alright, here come the core phrases:

1. First person perspective (FPP)
2. Melee
3. Bullet Hell
4. Arenas

Let’s now stop for a second and talk about inspirations connected with these phrases. Many people say our game is very similar to Ghostrunner and I can’t disagree. In fact, it’s our main inspiration for the combination of FPP and melee. Meanwhile, for the bullet hell aspect we look towards Returnal. What’s important, it’s also a 3d game, which is quite rare. Have you ever noticed how few bullet hell games with 3d perspective there are? I’ll try to explain later why is that. There’s also another bullet hell that we’re looking at while designing our game, called Enter the Gungeon. This one is in 2d, but I like to look there for inspirations for attack patterns. Last but not least comes our inspiration for the level structure. For this one, we’re looking towards Doom Eternal. It’s a game well known for great arenas, enemies and its gameplay loop.

However, none of these games have all of our core phrases in their gameplay. They only have two or three of them at a time. In fact, I never saw a game that would combine them all. That’s why we have to solve gameplay core problems that, I guess, no-one before had to solve. Sounds dramatic? Well then, it’s our daily basis let’s now break it down. Let me dive into the specific problems with joining these gameplay aspects.

Problem 1: FPP + Melee

I’d say this one is not so bad. There are actually a lot of games that do that. I bring this up first so I can refer to it later, because it affects other problems as well.

The decision of combining first person perspective with melee attacks comes with many limitations. If you look at our inspiration, Ghostrunner, you will see that all your enemies die after one hit. They have no healthbars or anything like that. It’s something that many people find as the feature that defines the game. However, after an analysis you’ll understand that a fast paced game with a first person perspective and melee attacks just can’t do it in any other way.

 Look at these poor, fragile enemies

Why? Well, there’s a couple of reasons, but the main problem is the limitaion of what you can see. In most games focused around close combat you see your entire character, so you can easily react to what’s happening around you. In FPP, if you want to know what your enemies are planing to do, you need to turn around and look at them. And when you’re within the melee attack range, which is usually something less than five meters, the enemy will dominate your screen, making it impossible to control anything else on the arena. That would make fighting more enemies almost impossible. You would have to quickly switch camera every second between the foe you’re currently hitting and the other ones if you don’t want to get killed.

The one-hit kill is a great solution, but it also creates some problems. It makes all the enemies feel very weak and dramatically shortens their lifespan. They usually live no longer than several seconds after you decide to attack them. Also, in Ghostrunner you die after a single hit, so it works better - you are also that fragile, and the gameplay revolves around your frequent deaths and fast-paced kill or be killed schematic. But we’re creating a bullet hell, so making player die on any hit would make the game terribly difficult and feel very unfair. That’s why we had to grant player some health points to allow making some mistakes. Unfortunately, it created a significant disproportion between player’s and enemy’s durability. On easier arenas some players felt like a tank, that just has to approach each enemy and click on it, with no actual challenge to it.

Our solutions so far? Since the beginning we tried to make the path to kill more interesting and the time to kill longer. In the first demo we tried the panic mechanic. The enemies back then could only be killed after you caused them to panic, which was usually achieved by falling down on them from a significant height. It turned out very unintuitive, so in the next demo we tried different approach. We made our enemies killable while they were in air and added the dive ability that allowed you to slam land and throw enemies around, which made them vulnerable. It was simpler and felt better. Still, the path of killing enemies, while being more interesting than “approach and click”, was also too complicated for many of our players.

 First demo’s panic mechanic, activated by falling down on enemy

Problem 2: FPP + Bullet Hell

Ah yes. The Bullet Hell aspect.

You see, most of Bullet Hell games are in 2d space for a reason. When you look at two-dimensional area you can see everything around your character. This is something that’s usually also preserved in isometric perspective, but often this one is technically just 2d space with 3d graphics. On the other hand, when you are in a first person perspective, your awareness of surroundings is very limited because of your field of view (as stated in the previous section). This makes creating an FPP bullet hell extremely hard, because how can the player dodge bullets while not being able to see all of them?

Our main idea to solve this problem was limiting performing a typical bullet hell attack to only one enemy at a time. The rest of them would just do regular attacks, that you can dodge by moving in any direction. This would allow the player to focus on that one enemy performing bullet hell attack or at least be aware where the projectiles will be coming from while fighting on the arena.

 This is the attack I’m talking about

However, there are some problems with this solution. The main one is the arena structure. This approach pretty much boiled our arenas down to big horizontal planes with no places to hide. The only inner walls allowed there were the transparent ones, that the projectiles were passing through. It was made to prevent the player from covering himself using the arena geometry from that one enemy making a bullet hell attack. It was meant to preserve the bullet hell aspect, but unfortunately it made our arenas really limited and similar to each other. Also, all enemies were totally insignificant until they became the ones to perform this attack. Their regular attack damage was low very low pitifully low, and only the jump mechanic made them dangerous in any way. Also, that one foe making a bullet hell attack felt like a totally different enemy. Some of our players didn’t event noticed it’s the same guy, due to the very different behaviour and look.

Problem 3: Melee + Bullet Hell

Nah, this one.

Well, it’s similar to the previous one. In most of the bullet hell games players are shooting at their enemies. Usually, there is some preferred distance at which you’re accurate enough to hit your target, while being far enough from the enemy to see its attack patterns and dodge incoming projectiles. Also, in most of those games when you move away from the enemy, its attacks will become less dense and you can easily navigate between projectiles. When you only have a melee attack, you lose this “comfort distance” aspect, as you have to go directly to the exact enemy position to kill them. The closer you get, the worse the attack will be, as it will get more dense and you will have less and less time to prepare. When you’re closer than ten meters from the enemy, you actually can’t do anything to avoid being hit by its attacks, because you just don’t have any time to react to the spawning projectiles.

 Notice how the player is trying to keep a certain distance from his opponent

I think we still haven’t put enough effort into fixing this problem in the previous demos. The main feature we’ve created is a dash that grants you invincibility when you perform it and for a short time after that. It’s a great way of approaching enemies. You can use it go through the waves of projectiles without suffering any damage. You can also dash close to the enemy and kill him while avoiding attacks that could be spawned in your face when you’re that close. Also, the dive mechanic made it possible to prevent enemies from attacking for a short period, which can be used to quickly close the distance and kill them. But, these are the things that you have to learn and when misused don’t give those benefits. We need something more built-in, to help every player, no matter how experienced or skilled they are.

Upcoming solutions

As you can see, there are a lot of choices to be made that are difficult and not yet tested in many other games. These experiments take a while and not always end with success. Now, I will tell you about some changes that we’re planning to make to better solve the issues I mentioned.

To fix both Melee + Bullet Hell and FPP + Bullet Hell problems, we decided to step away from the idea of one enemy on the arena making a bullet hell attack. Instead, to avoid player being shot in the back, we plan to give enemies different behaviours based on whether they’re visible on the screen or not. The ones that the player can see will be able to perform deadlier and more “bullet-hell-like” attacks. Also, their attacks will change based on their distance from player. While approaching an enemy, its attacks will get slower or easier to dodge, to compensate your shortening time to response. The system for handling this behaviour is already finished, but we’re still experimenting to create the proper attacks for each situation. It should make it much easier to fight enemies while only having a melee attack, as they will adjust to your position and sight. It should also feel more like a bullet hell game if we make all enemies have bullet hell attacks as their basic attacks. What’s more, it’ll unlock better ways of creating levels with more interesting and vertical geometry for us.

About the FPP + Melee problem, we want to remove the “way to defeat enemy” feature. Instead, all enemies will be vulnerable all the time and in most cases will die from one hit. I say “most cases” because we’re experimenting with one that would require more hits to kill. However, it’s still a work in progress and I’m not sure if it’s gonna work. Anyway, to compensate for removing this feature, we’re planning to add systems that will encourage player to still perform some parkour moves before killing an enemy. We just don’t want these actions to be mandatory, as it caused many problems with learning the game and keeping the gameplay flow. We’re now experimenting with something we’ve planned for quite some time, which is the points system. The player will be granted style points for parkour, killing enemies and avoiding projectiles. This score will then result in buffs that will help the player defeat foes and survive. It should make the first person combat easier and more intuitive, while keeping the “more interesting” ways of defeating enemies and adding possibilities to play way more efficient with specific gameplay patterns.

Well, that was one long post, so I think that’s it for today. I really have to finish writing it and focus on creating the game. Until the next time!

Gahlammon