RIDDEN
RIDDEN is a 2D side-scrolling space shooter controlled entirely by the mouse. Play as an armed maintenance drone aboard a spaceship overrun by aliens. Collect organic matter to analyse, upgrade your on-board systems, and fight through alien bosses as you strive to complete your final directives.
Game Design
The initial inspiration I had for Ridden was from Dead Space. In particular, I liked how they utilized digetic UI throughout the game, immersing the player further in to the world. However, I wanted to make the game even more minimal. As a result I took inspiration from a game called Downwell. Downwell is a minimalist platforming game with a simple colour pallette and simple controls. However, every input you can make has about 3 or more different actions. What interested me about both these games was stripping back a game to it's core inputs, aesthetics and mechanics, whilst still creating a breadth of interesting, immersive gameplay. To achieve this, the idea was Minamalism in every sense of the word. The entire game's controls are with the mouse. You accelerate with the right click, shoot with the left, which also pushes you back. The colour pallette is incredibly minamilst, only sticking to black and blue, with art style inspiration from Badland. All UI is digetic like Dead Space, with Lvl Up's taking form as a hologram in world. Lastly, the music adapts to the amount and type of enemies on screen at any given point, allowing the player to get a sense of warning, without needing UI warnings on screen.
Programming
The engine chosen for the game was Unity. My responsibilites included the movement system, random map generation, the levelling system and a custom technical audio solution which adapts depending on the type of enemies left in the room.
