ChromaThoth is now live!

The Concept:

ChromaThoth aimed to bring a new twist to the bullet hell genre with the use of grid based movement. We chose this combination because it was something we had never seen before and though it could change how you approach the genre at a fundamental level and possibly introduce a higher skill ceiling for movement once you gain mastery over the unconventional controls. Settling on bullet hell took some time though. Some other concepts we considered were a turn-based system or Pokémon Mystery Dungeon style gameplay, but neither of those had the hook we were looking for. 

Challenges:

For most of our team we were learning unreal engine for the first time, so learning a whole new engine in 2 weeks was a big challenge. We would often have many days just spent figuring out bugs and holding up development. When it came time to build our game we experienced a game breaking bug that would have made the game unplayable. We nearly thought the game wouldn't make it out on time, but we pushed through and were able to submit our game. 

What Went Right:

Movement in this game was a huge debate throughout development and went through several iterations. We settled on a system where the player controls which grid box is selected using only 4 directions of movement, and the player character navigates to it. We felt this decoupling of player and controls could lead to some exciting gameplay. Limiting movement to 4 directions was a gamble but we thought it could be interesting to navigate between bullets with this limitation. 

Areas for Improvement:

Currently, enemies can't deal damage, and the wave system isn't implemented. Fixing these is our top priority in future updates.

Thanks for joining us on this journey! Stay tuned for more updates