Goo & Gunpowder
A screen full of bullets and monsters, yet the player always understands what's going on. The design challenge was making chaos readable.
Result: Tuning guided by playtests and by a bot that plays on its own
- What
- Pixel art roguelike game
- Client
- Personal project
- Role
- Game designer
- Timeline
- In progress
- Platform
- Web (PC)
The idea
Goo & Gunpowder is a bullet heaven, the Vampire Survivors genre: weapons fire on their own while the player moves, dodges and picks upgrades. I started with the design document, built on three pillars that guide every decision.
- Readable chaos
- A screen full of enemies, yet the player always knows where they are and what hit them.
- Every run unlocks something
- Even after losing, the player walks away with progress: coins, challenges and new content.
- Easy to grasp, deep to combine
- Each piece is simple; the fun is in combining weapons and ammo.
- Every enemy asks for an action
- The Runner asks for a dash, the Shadow for 360° awareness and the Shield-bearer for flanking.
Measure instead of guess
Every test run becomes a log, and a bot plays batches of runs on its own to compare versions. That's how the biggest problem showed up: after the first boss came three minutes of pure repetition, with nothing new and no goal.
The answer was a second act: the ground darkens, events get stronger, two new enemies arrive and the run ends with a final boss.
- Logged playtests
- Time, level, build and cause of defeat for every run.
- Test bot
- Runs with a fixed seed, to compare before and after each tweak.
- Listening to players
- Softer sound and a difficulty pass based on what playtests said.
- Accessibility
- Options to reduce screen shake and flashes, on top of volume controls.
Result
A game playable in the browser, from the menu to the final boss, with sound and music generated in code.
Next on the roadmap: weapon evolutions, difficulty levels and a PC release.
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