The Unfortunate Existence of You
2022
Game Design
Uni Module
You are G4-Briel, a classified prototype Guerrilla Combat Unit created by Divine Industries in their pursuit for a soldier with reflexes, perception, strength and agility, combined with the cold brutality of a machine. Each of your predecessors were excellent killing machines, however, they were fundamentally flawed as they never had a reliable power source to sustain prolonged missions. To combat this need for a power source, the fourth iteration was implanted with the brain, nervous system and heart from an unknown and unwilling test subject
These organs smashed and intertwined amongst machinery are the only thing that remain of your once human past.
Game Summary
Game Premise
The Unfortunate Existence of You is a first-person arena shooter where the player must fight a seemingly endless onslaught of enemies. As a combat unit that learns through gathering data, some enemies that are killed will drop their essence, which, when enough has been collected, your main weapon will upgrade. As the game progresses, enemies will begin to spawn faster as well as becoming buffed periodically throughout the game.
Enemies
Basic Skulls are the weakest enemy, only requiring a single shot to kill. They aren't too fast, however, they travel in packs.
If you don't deal with them quickly, you may get overwhelmed.
Basic Skull
Enhanced Skulls are faster, stronger and deadlier than their counterpart. These enemies are spawned alongside Basic Skulls, but unlike the Basic Skulls, they're lone wolves and will chase you down.
Killing an Enhanced Skull with drop their demon essence.
Enhanced Skull
These enemies spawn at certain time intervals, which gradually decreases the longer the player is alive. They're the main spawners for both the Basic and Enhanced Skull. As long as these Skull Spawners are alive, they will continuously keep spawning Skulls, so kill them as soon as you see one.
They don't damage the player, but do have a high amount of health.
Skull Spawner
The Seraphim can be considered a mini-boss of sorts. Once it appears, it will buff every enemy that is currently alive as well as any enemy that spawns whilst it's alive. Basic and Enhanced Skulls have their health, movement speed, and damage increased, whilst Skull Spawners have their health increased and the Skull spawn interval time decreased.
Seraphim
With Marbleous being a casual game with a simple playstyle, there was not much urgency to have a great deal of onboarding, as the player would understand the overall gameplay loop within a few levels. Future onboarding would have been implemented as new pieces were introduced that required new interactions from the player, if Marbleous was to be released as a full standalone game.
With Marbleous having such a simple control scheme and the game consisting of only a few levels, I felt as though it wasn't necessary to have a control's menu for players to refer back to, instead, the controls are taught to the player in specific levels within the game space; simple game, simple UI. For example, in the first level, the player is taught how to move pieces. Making the words Click and Drag have a bold style compared to the rest of the text gives these words a higher sense of priority against the rest of the text, allowing the player to understand what interaction is needed without necessarily reading the entire text. These instructions persist through each level they are presented in, so if the player were to fail a level, the intructions will still be there on their next attempt.
The Unfortunate Existence of You Trailer
Gameplay Loop and Progression
Rather than implementing a wave based system, I opted to create a single endless wave system. However, this wave system does not mean that there is no enemy or player progression. The player initially starts with a single stream of projectiles, this is considered the player's base level, over the course of the game the player can collect Demonic Essence from defeated enemies, which will upgrade their weapon; increasing the number of projectiles shot, rate of fire and damage. They can do this two times, once when 25 Demonic Essence has been collected and a final time when 50 Demonic Essence has been collected.
Players can also change how minor mechanics work, such as their movement. The player can continuously jump to increase their movement speed, a version of bunny hopping that rewards the player for continuous movement.
