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The Game:

The game is a roguelike twin stick shooter located in an hypothetic future in which machines are so advanced that the non-humanity of the artificial protagonist will be putted in discussion.

The Game protagonist is an AI in a mysterious advanced lab, that has been able to replicate the human brain in a virtual program. After some tests, one of the subjects start to find out what the company was doing and decide after a bad incident to escape the building. Since he is only a virtual program, he needs to escape this internal virtual network of the building to reach freedom (the internet).
The character you play as can shift between different types of informatic viruses that you transform into to fight the security system of the network and breach out of it.
The art style will be abstract 2D sprites with lots of neon lights all over the place.

Levels are placed procedurally, but rooms are populated from a predesigned pool encoded in sprites. In the demo the level is hand made.
 

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My Role in the team:

The team had a lot of problems through the year and I had basic experience in every sector of gamedev, so I worked on the entire project.
I coded the characters, created enemies sprites, designed gameplay abilities and levels. I also created a hybrid procedural level generation system which unfortunately was not finished due to time. A basic story to justify the events was also in the final document.
 

Design:

The whole ideation process was a team effort in which designer had to moderate, the theme was to produce a 2D game trying to improve on an arcade game from 1980-90. We chose to improve on gauntlet and give it a cyberpunk thron-like artistic twist. Characters and abilities are all designed around computer viruses and network systems, and each room for the procedural generation was hand drawn.
 

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Art:

Enemies sprite pixelart were made using photoshop, adding glowing effects to give the neon glowing look. Every enemy had his own color as it was color coded fo the weakness. I then imported character spritesheet and tiles to make a tile palette and assemble the demo level.
 

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Coding:

Starting with the character, coding the abilities was a challenge, but in the end i managed to get a basic shooting projectile and a special one that infects enemies and transform them into a clone of yourself that follows your actions precisely. 3 other abilities are planned in the GDD but due to time constraint they weren't implemented. Enemy behaviour was simple and  got two enemies in the game pretty early, the chaser and the splitter.

I then proceeded to creaete a camera that positions itself in a smart way, checking where the character is moving and where it is shooting. After that, I took a creative break designing and creating an icosphere with random distortion and links between nodes(pointcloud style) that I've used for the main menu. Finally I spent my remaining time on a procedural generation based on rectangolar rooms randomly placed using colliders overlapping and populated using a pool of images that assign each pixel color to a specific tile. The rooms are then connected with a triangulation algorithm. It worked but was extremely unpolished at the end so I had to discard it for presentation sake.

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