Red Sand
Designer and Creator
Screenshots
Overview
Red Sand is a simple 2D action game where the player controls the warrior Xerxes in his battle against an army of explosive cacti. The game’s combat is centered around a melee attack which is performed with a left click. The attack will cause knockback on enemies and cacti can be juggle while they are in the air. Each enemy takes three hits to kill and the indicator in the top right shows how many more cacti must be defeated in order for the level to be cleared. Cacti explode on contact with the player and cause them to lose a life as a result. The enemies will continue to spawn and move forward until either the player wins or runs out of lives and loses. There are three levels which each get progressively harder since more cacti need to be defeated.
Contributions
Red Sand is a project I worked on independently and every aspect (apart from the music and sounds) of the game were my own creation. This was the second game of any significance I ever made and I wanted to make something centered around melee combat. I made this choice because I have always loved melee action games and I wanted to start learning the fundamentals of such systems. I think that the knockback is a crucial aspect of Red Sand’s core gameplay as the player has no defensive options and the cacti will continuously move towards the player from both sides of the screen. The knockback gives the player some breathing room and also allows for multi-hit juggles to quickly dispatch enemies. I was forced to limit the gameplay for this project as I invested much of my time creating the art assets for the game. I had never made pixel art before this and all the time I spent making the sprites gave me a better appreciation for the work done by artists.
Reflections/Design Thoughts
Looking back on the experience, I think that game feel is one of the better aspects of this game, but I definitely wanted to improve on the combat in future projects after finishing. In particular I wanted to use a different system for the hitbox and frame data on the melee attack. In this game, I used Unity’s OverlapCircle method to cast a circular hitbox over enemies. However this method did not allow for the proper tuning of hitboxes or the precise adjustment of startup, active, and recovery frames on attacks. After this project, I wanted to find a way to link animations and hitboxes more closely. I learned how to do this very thing when I eventually worked on my next game, Revenge of Quaternius.
The player successfully attacking an enemy..