Counter Squall

 

Counter Squall is a game where you defend your cabins from the storm of skeleton enemies that want to tear them down.

The game is published over at Itch.io, where you can download it for free.

 

​

This project was extremely fun to work on, and utilized some interesting algorithms, such as flocking, and screen shake. Great art was produced, and so were lots and lots of spooky skeletons.

​

My Role:

I was the sole programmer on this project. I really put forth the effort in this game to make it feel and sound good. When the core game was finished, I went through it to see what could be improved, adding things like screen shake, extra animations, fading, explosions, menus and UI. I wanted to ensure that the player had as much information available to them as necessary, which brought about decisions like different damaged house states.

The game was designed by myself as well, with inspiration coming from wave based survival zombie games, with an arcade style of play. One of the interesting design choices being worked on at the time, was how the movement of the boss should be. He fires lightning at you from a distance, so he had to always keep the player in his damage vicinity, and his reach was long, so the player shouldn't be allowed to just jump in close to him where he would miss. This was solved by having him move backwards twice as fast as he moved forwards, to prevent player exploit.

I made sure to allow my friends and colleagues to test out my game throughout different stages of development, to ensure the game was fun, and to tweak the difficulty. I had some mixed responses, with some people saying it was too hard, and some people breezing through the game. This testing brought about a nice middleground, where I felt the game was fair.