Bullet Devil: Attack of the Elements

For our third year game, we have decided to make an arena survival shooter where you, the player, will have to defend against waves of enemies while protecting your objective. You play as the Bullet Devil (our main character from our year 2 game), and you had to make an emergency landing on a nearby planet to escape from your enemies. Sadly, your landing was not the softest landing and the natives of the planet has gone to defend their land against the foreign creature, you! You must defend not only yourself but your ship as well, and defeat the waves of native aliens on the planet. These enemies are different from the usual enemies you face, they know how to control the elements and they use this power to try and eliminate you. You steal this power and empower your weapons with the elements to help defend against the attacks.

Gameplay Mechanics:
One of our main gameplay features we plan to implement in our game are the power of the elements in the enemies as well as the player's weapons. Each element will have a unique ability that affects the enemies and the guns the player wields. We plan to have a feature that evaluates the player on their progress, and depending on how well he/she is doing, the difficulty will slowly increase to create either more of a challenge for the player or to help the player complete the level.

Elements:
We plan to have 6 element types by the end of the year. Each element has its own unique ability.

- Fire: burns  the enemy and deals damage over time
- Ice: Slows the enemy down by reducing their movement speed
- Earth: Snares or immobilizes the enemy
- Air: creates a big wave and knocks back the enemy
- Light: Blinds the enemy (changes the A.I so the enemy is confused for awhile)
- Dark: Strongest and most deadly weapons in the game (can cause damage to the user)

Each element will have a counter. Opposite elements deal bonus damage to their targets but similar elements will deal reduced damage.
The current counters we have are:
Fire <--counters--> Ice (fire deal bonus damage to ice and ice deals bonus damage to fire)
Earth <--counters--> Air
Light <--counters--> Dark

This is a very simple counter mechanic in our game that players can easily get (unlike starcraft 2 where i have to learn all the counters after awhile, sad face)

Items and Pick Ups:
Each map will have a set of chests that spawn after a few waves. When the player opens these chest, they will be rewarded with either money or ammunition. Money will be used to unlock weapons and elements for the weapons they use. This gives an incentive to continue playing since there is a goal (unlocking every weapon).

Current and Future Plans:
What we plan to have for this semester is a good base with most of our mechanics implemented such has basic movement and shooting. Implementing the basic features will also have to be done such as collision detection/response, wave spawning and basic enemy AI. For next semester not only do we want to make a game look really nice with particles and shaders, but also many other features in the game, one which is co-op (obviously), another possible game mode, and also a way to expand on the player's arsenal. Our main focus though is to make a fun game that everyone can enjoy playing for many hours.