BOOOM! Participant: HIFTS

By 正在变成索狗的根号三

This article is from https://www.gcores.com/articles/115037

Hi guys. I'm the chief maker and planer of ENDKEY. Call me Root Three. We've made a top view action game called HIFTS for the BOOOM! I believe you guys are like "what the heck is that name for?" Well, it was from the theme SHIFT. If we move the letters from right to left, the S would apear at the right end, become HIFTS. It shows our understanding of SHIFT: if you shift some dimension of some thing, the thing will be completely different.

I think our game is just like its name, because of the complexity of the system and the difficulties of showing it directly, most of players would go "what the heck" when they laied hands on our game for the first time.

So, this article is about telling you guys what the game is for, and to show some content.

The progress of making

Our team has four members: I'm the chief maker and system planer, programer is our very reliable Brother Dragon (the name is so tough but it's a she), excutive planer is Leona, and visual artist Pin. Pin is not only our visual art labor, but also is one of my favorite concept designers. There are lots of strong-styled concept drawings in his weibo . If you like our visual art, you can check it out.

This is our main visual art, by Pin.

Before the theme was released on 24th August, we had already made a raw plan for our game: It should be based on a retro platform and retro graphic but contains a completely new gameplay. This idea went through the whole progress of making, and is in the game.

I conceived a creative plan before the theme was released. It was about the main character challenging a powerful boss. Every time he dodges a hit from the boss, he doubles his attacking power. But if the boss hit him for once, he would be dead. This plan combined some specialties of the Titan Souls and the Monster Hunter and some more games. It was a warm-up before the real job. And in the progress of conceiving this plan, I decided the key words of our final game: battle of bosses, fast rhythm, intensity & excitement, action game.

My first thought was a Titan Souls-ish game.

After the theme was released, naturally, I turned my thoughts into the switching of attributes, but the core experience point of the game was not clear at that time. Meanwhile, according to the time limite and the skill trees of us, we decided to avoid making an action game，to make a SLG. Meanwhile, we hoped to make a fast rhythym SLG that is different to classical SLG. So, at this phase, I abstracted chatacter, swiching of attributes and enemies into chests, and involved equipment and skill system, by swiching attributes on the chest map to active different skills of the equipment, to destroy enemies. This plan was denied by the team, because the system would be too complex, and would need the player to try and error, not good for a demo.

The secound version was like the Just One Boss on Pico-8.

The third version is what we are using currently. It has cleared the core experience point based on the first and secound version: by swiching attributes real-timely to alow the chatacter being in BUFF & DEBUFF, to avoid shortage and promote advantage, to destroy enemies. And the game style was decided to be action game.

This is the running video

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/ee21d4_ba6eb013ef8049069ebfe9b4efdfeaee/1080p/mp4/file.mp4

I believe that you guys are confused. Don't worry, now it's time for details.

Instruction

The content of the final version is few. There's just one boss battle for whole game, and the player can only attack or force attack. Beside those, the character can sprint, change attributes and use active skill. On the D.E.O.T., direction buttons are for moving, X is for attacking (hold to force attack), A is for sprinting, B is for using active skill, Y is for changing attributes.

By pressing button A, player can adjust the numbers of offensive, defensive and agility. The different number of these attributes equal to different BUFF and DEBUFF status. If you used the active skill, the chatacter would be in the status of invincible for a while. When the time of invincible went off, character would go weak for a while in which 2 random attributes would go very low. Besides the character, the boss also has the same system, but the HP and attributes numbers are much higher. So the goal is to avoid death and kill the boss.