THE FIRST PROJECT: a shoot-em-up

The game can be played on my itch.io page.

Cow’a’bunga was a team project made during my first semester at University. I was one of three programming students on this project, and was responsible for the tutorial, scene transitions, score system, menu system, sound system and level selection system. I also did a small amount of support work on the portal projectile scripts, and a enemy movement behaviour scripts.

The title is a bit tongue-in-cheek, as we made our protagonist a cow cowboy (cowgirl?). We decided that we didn’t want a clear gender for the protagonist nor the aliens, as that wasn’t a very important part of the identity nor the aesthetic.

The brief of this project was to design a weak protagonist with a singular weapon or power needed to overcome the enemy. To achieve this the team decided from the beginning that the player does not get to have a weapon to fight with. We instead settled on using a portal gun to form a trajectory puzzle where the player has to return the enemy’s own projectiles against them.

This project was written in C#, as is the custom with Unity, and was a chance for me to work with rotational mathematics before I had even learned it from the course. Because the projectiles in this game needed to be able to exit out of a portal that doesn’t have the same alignment of the entry portal, math had to be used to rotate the projectile to appropriately eject the projectile when it exited from a portal pointing in a different direction.

Other than that I had to spend a lot of time creating the logic for the tutorial level to make sure it would not progress until the player had adequately demonstrated an ability to control the character and the portal gun, since onboarding was going to make or break the player’s ability to play the following two levels.

This was my first ever project making a proper game with programming, and while Unity does make liberal use of components that lower the need to code, it was still a good learning opportunity.

I would perhaps one day want to revisit this project as it is a charming game. I think I would try to adapt it for mobile games, somehow, and double-down on the puzzle elements of the enemy projectiles, instead of it being a shooting gallery.

What I would try to implement if I returned to this project is:

1. Try to move it off from the Unity engine.
2. Add objects that reflect the portal gun so get the portals to land on objects that are out of line-of-sight.
3. Make the game more of a puzzle instead of a shmup with levels tailored to clever thinking and strategy rather than running around avoiding bullets while trying to clear enemies as fast as possible.
4. Add some sort of power-up or upgrade system, while preserving the vulnerability of the protagonist.
5. More cows.