Jesper Börjesson.

Technical Level Designer

Hellbent

Shoot em up Bullet Hell

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Summary

Hellbent is a 2D shoot 'em up bullet hell game.

Specifications

  • Single player shoot 'em up game
  • Created in 8 weeks - half time
  • Using In-house Engine
  • Using Tiled as Editor

My Contributions

  • Level Design
  • Unit composition
  • Boss Design

The Team

  • Jesper Börjesson - Level Designer
  • Kevin Osgyan - Level Designer

  • Ludvig Olsson - Graphical Artist
  • Ruben Dahlstrand - Graphical Artist
  • Elsa Varland - Graphical Artist

  • Sofie Palén - Programmer
  • Christopher Rau - Programmer
  • Mattias Blomgren - Programmer
  • Emma Göransson - Programmer

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New limitations

Hellbent was made with new In-house 2D engine and with that new limitations. Since it would take a while for the team to get a playable game we as designers had a lot of time to design and pre-prod.

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Level Design

I was responsible for designing the three levels in the game and making sure that the game progressed smoothly. Since the would just scroll on its own this mainly depended on when enemies spawned.

Prototype
PrototypeBig
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Unit composition

The game had an extreme focus on enemies and one of my responsibilities was to create the waves of enemies the player would face. The goal was to create a nice pattern where the player could dance with the enemy’s bullets. It was hard to get difficulty right during development it tended to swing between very easy and very hard.

Prototype
PrototypeBig
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Boss Design

The game has three bosses that I designed, and I implemented two of the them. The last boss was implemented by programmers due to complexity. In the original design the bosses had a lot more unique and fun abilities but due to technical limitations they had to be simplified. In the final release the first two bosses use the systems as the normal enemies.

Prototype
PrototypeBig
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Closing Thoughts

This project really helped me understand how difficult balancing can be and that in order to get it right you need a lot of iteration and playtest from a wide range of players.

Download the game