Dragg' On Havoc

Dragg' On Havoc is a 2D Side-Scrolling Shoot em up (2D Shmup) that lets you control an Ace mercenary pilot named Zeke Gates. This game is an homage to all the old school 90's arcade shooters in its design and gameplay.

Genre: 2D Side-Scrolling Shmup

Team Size: 1(Me)

Engine: Unity3D

Platform: PC

Roles & responsibilities -

Gameplay & Mechanics Design

Coded & designed the general gameplay and all the neat power-ups.
Spiced up the movement to the player and added a bunch of nice effects to the shooting

UI Design

Coded all of the UI panels and scoreboards that tally and save previous high scores.
Added some animations for certain HUD elements (the portrait is from UN squadron, but making it animate was my doing).

Level Design

Designed the parallax scrolling for the backgrounds and their respective elements.

Animation Design

Programmed and worked on all the animations found throughout the game (sprites and assets are either bought from gamedevmarket or edited from free sources).

AI Design

Programmed and designed all the enemy patterns and spawning system.
Made a fully customizable shooting pattern for the enemies and the boss to make it more convenient.

Sound Design

Designed all of the sound effects that are in the game.
Remixed a classic Video Game song for the music.

Info on the development of Dragg' On Havoc:

One of my first solo projects and first time messing around with Unity3D. Dragg' On Havoc is a huge homage to all the 90's era arcade Shoot Em Ups (shmups), with a scoreboard, leveling system, and old school type upgrade pick up system. I can't stress it enough that most of the assets and sprites are not made by me. I got most of em from really cool open source places like gamedevmarket (shout out to Mokazar for the backgrounds) & OpenGameArt. *Disclaimer, I'm not sure who the original creator for the Einhander pixel art sprites is, so whoever knows, please contact me and let me know to give proper credit.

Now a bit about how I started approaching the game was making a U.N. Squadron spiritual successor, so I had to make the camera side-scrolling, I had to put a portrait and a leveling system and a shop to buy ships and sub-weapons (for the sake of making a deadline, the demo will not have the shop available). I also had to think about how the ship was gonna move, making it either very fast initially or have the levels ups impact how you move and shoot. So I went through at least 4 types of designs and ended up with the one you can see from the videos.

This is the first rendition of these ideas put in a playable thing. It was pretty rough around the edges missing a lot of polish, but the core concept was there and it was swinging the right way around this point.

Around 2 weeks later after that first draft demo, the game started to shape up. Some needed enemy variety (albeit with the same sprites, just different colors), and a nice looking scoreboard were added. It took form and it was getting fun to play. I also made all of the sound effects and the song. Which is a remix of White Land 1 from F.Zero

The portraits from U.N. Squadron, since I couldn't find suitable portraits, I decided to use the ones from the game that inspired this project (as placeholders, until then).

The pickups and some UI elements are made by me, the Metal Slug UI designs specifically inspired the pickup's designs and colors since I love the motif so much.

Added effects and more game juice at this stage to make the game look more appealing, and gave some feedback to the player's actions.

All and all. Learning Unity3D and shmup game design/philosophy was undoubtedly entertaining, and fun to do. It rekindled a fire in my heart to pursue game development in other engines and try new stuff, and I had to learn how to deal with not having someone help me with the art and design of these games for once.