Reflectio is a game I made with classmates during the whole of our 1st year's 2nd semester. We were tasked to make a shoot'em up game on the Construct3 engine, it was very novel to me as I had almost never used it but it was a very interesting experience nonetheless.
Developping this game, we took on a different approach towards shoot'em ups and decided to do some sort of "reverse shoot'em up".
After multiple attempts with different core systems, we decided to make it so that the player could control a spaceship that would create a shield on one of 8 sides around itself, which would then bounce back enemy shots to kill other enemies.
Genre :
Shoot'em up
Shoot'em up
Software(s) :
Construct3, Illustrator, Reaper
Construct3, Illustrator, Reaper
My contributions :
Game Design, Programming
Game Design, Programming
Construct3 uses visual scripting to allow new game designers to familiarize themselves more easily with game creation without being troubled by the technical difficulties accompanied by classic programming.
Having already learned how to program in other languages like C#, I easily got the hang of it and was able to immerse myself immediately in the creation of prototypes.
At first, i started making our game with the Level Design of any "classic" shoot'em up, however I quickly realized that it would not work out with our core mechanic as the game would have a very different feel compared to other games of the same genre.
After realizing that, i started experimenting with different shapes for the map.
In the end, I decided to go with an octogon shaped map, where the player would be regularly surrounded by enemies, he would then have to clear them out quickly unless he wants to be overwhelmed by the following waves.
V1
V2
Final Version
Along this change to the map's shape, the core system had to be reworked, originally I intended to create some different shaped blocks at certain positions (either by clicking using the mouse or by sending a block a certain distance from the player in any desired direction).
The new map design made this previous system very inefficient and a lot less interesting. I decided to change it to a shield the player would create around the avatar that would rebound enemy shots in the direction it points to.
During the creation of this game, we had to test it out a lot as we had a lot of issues with balancing.
In order to test the game thoroughly, I shared it to my class and asked them to try it out then give me their feedback about it. Thanks to that, we managed to fix many small issues within the game (from bugs/glitches to difficulty issues we hadn't been aware of as we had quickly gotten used to the extreme difficulty of the game during the creation process) all the way to the main issue we had : saturation.
At some point, our game became too hard if the player hadn't played perfectly, so much that it became certain to lose in a very unfair manner after some time.
In the final game, we managed to fix most of our issues and ended up fairly satisfied with the result.
Try it here : ITCH.IO