Ascension

About

Ascension is a top down twin-stick shooter developed in Unity as a school project. The goal of this project was to come in and update on the foundation laid by the group before us. I worked as game director and designed and developed some of the quality of life updates as well as the new survival mode that was added.

Gameplay

The main game followed a very simple structure, traverse through the level killing all the enemies and then unlock the door to the next level or boss. Enemies you kill can drop health potions and two types of arrow upgrades that can be combined for deadly effect.

The survival mode was inspired by horde shooters and games like vampire survivors that flood your screen with enemies. The goal is to survive as long as possible.

My Work on the Project

Easing the Player Experience

One of my biggest takeaways from this project was how you as a developer can help the player through seemingly unfair tasks. There were some major problems that players were encountering issues with some of which included finding the last few enemies and having to replay through the entire game upon death. I considered these to be my focus in helping the player experience.

To tackle the problem of being unable to find an enemy you missed I came up with a very simple solution. I had an arrow point to the closest enemy to the player. Looking back on it I feel like there could’ve been a less hand holding solution, but this solution also helped with another major problem which was enemies that were off the screen were taking players by surprise and with the arrow this became a less common problem for players.

The difficulty of the game lead to multiple problems for players. Enemies had too much health and took too long to kill so I went and squished the numbers so the player feels more rewarded and can actually take on multiple enemies at a time. After this there was still too much damage being pushed out so instead of altering the enemy damage numbers I increased the drop rate of health potions and added a more rare max health potion.

The final hurdle of the game being too difficult was that if you died on any level you would be sent to the very start. The change I made to solve this was by adding checkpoints. I felt that even though the original vision seemed to lean towards a roguelike format it did not work in the favor of how we were presenting the game. In one level you would instantly be killed by falling and that also made this solution necessary, but leaned me towards another way of easing that problem by only dealing one heart of damage to the player when they fell.

Upgrade Changes

One of the big things me and one of the programmers tackled was the game’s upgrade system. When we got our hands on the project the upgrades worked very simple. Certain upgrades change how your arrow shoots (double shot, piercing shot) and another changes how your arrow hits (slow shot, explosion shot, poison shot).

The problem we encountered with that format was that once someone had figured out the most optimal arrow upgrades they would never even consider picking up another upgrade. How did we counteract this? We added a timer to the upgrades to encourage picking them up more frequently and not relying on the same tools the entire game. Elemental weaknesses on enemies were also added, though these did not end up making a huge impact as we didn’t indicate them well enough.

The last thing I implemented to this was an upgrade to the upgrades. Let’s say a player’s timer is running out on a piercing shot power up and the same power up is on the floor, they could then pick it up and now that piercing shot shoots through one more extra enemy at its second level. These variations of upgrades led to unexpected but very interesting combos. My favorite was combining piercing shot and explosion shot to have the arrow explode for each enemy hit causing huge widespread damage.

With these upgrade changes I felt very satisfied with, but I also feel like much could be done differently. While the timer encouraged players to pick more up it also didn’t matter too much when an enemy would just drop the power up again and reset the timer. The poison shot also was widely ignored by players as it didn’t do enough damage at its lowest level and was resisted by too many enemies.