Genre: First person shooter
Project started on: July 2nd
Project completed on: August 8th
Approximate time spent on project: 60 hours
Enemy Database is a GameJam game that I made for the ‘A Game By It’s Cover 2019’ jam where you had to use a cart from Famicase 2019 as your inspiration. I decided quickly on Enemy Database, a cart that gave me plenty of ideas to make a sci-fi themed first person shooter where you would recover enemies to a big database while taking part in a small story of sorts.
I knew what I wanted to do when I started, a shooter with procedurally generated enemies (based on the jam modifier, Ten Thousand Statistically Accurate Band Names) where you would alternate between reading mails, equipping upgrades and fighting enemies. It took me way longer than I would’ve wanted to because I was overburdened with other stuff and short 1-hour work sessions don’t yield as much result as fewer 5-8 hour sessions.
Getting all the mechanics in there wasn’t too bad, but I should’ve scoped smaller, it probably wouldn’t have hurt the game at all. Instead of having 151 fights and 30 gear parts you can equip and 20 emails, there could’ve been way less and the core idea of the game would’ve been there. Still, I wanted a -full- game with a beginning and an end, and that’s what I made!
Screenshots
About the game
The core mechanic of the game is about scanning a database to find enemies and then getting into arena fights with them. You start up with only a basic shooting action, but you quickly unlock a charged shot, a parry move and a shield.
Scanning for enemies is quite easy, you have a slider that goes from ‘easy’ to ‘hard’ and you can select which level you want for the next enemy you’re going to fight. Enemies will be of different shapes, AI types and have different weaponry based on their names.
After a while you unlock ‘parts’ that you can equip, you need to find them by defeating enemies, completing certain conditions - like not having taken any damage - will increase your odds of getting one. The more boss enemies you capture, the more of them you can equip. There are 30 different ones and they range from increasing your damage, health, the number of bullets you fire to improve specific special skills.
Then there are these special skills, you have four of them, one slows down time for enemies, another allows you to fly for a short duration, the third one hurts enemies by randomly moving RAM blocks around and the last one summons a turret that will fight for you.
Finally you can get easter eggs by capturing certain types of enemies, these give you story details but also powerful bonuses. You might need to futz around with the enemy scanner in order to get them all!