WARmen | Devpost

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Inspiration

We were already leaning towards a bullet-hell style of game, since it was something none of us had made in a hackathon before. Since this was a women and non-men centered hackathon, we started to think about how we could combine those ideas. We realized that under-represented genders are unfortunately often dodging attacks from all sides, and so we decided to represent that feeling in a funny but sincere way. We wanted to have the player shoot back at the enemies (rather than reflecting or just dodging) to show how people have never just accepted these injustices and have always been fighting back.

What it does

It is a bullet-hell style shooting game in an arcade-game artstyle, where you dodge and shoot projectiles in three different levels. Each level has a different player and 3 different enemies, all themed after women and challenges women have faced and are facing now. The goal is to get through each level still alive and kicking in spite of the harsh obstacles society throws in the form of people trying to put the player down.

How we built it

We built the game entirely in Unity. We collaborated using Github, where we tried using a system where we each had our own branch so that we could work simultaneously while separate to avoid any potential merge conflicts in the most efficient way possible. Also, every single art asset in the game was drawn by us during the duration of the hackathon!!!

Challenges we ran into

Github was a huge challenge during the entire hackathon. As a team of all first years who do not have much experience with github, we made several mistakes that put us back hours in terms of work that was lost and unable to be recovered because we misunderstood how git works. Github did not play well with Unity, as we were getting bugs we didn’t really understand. Unity itself was not a walk in the park either, since 2 out of the 4 of us are very inexperienced.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud of the fact that we did not use a single premade art asset. From the players and enemies, to the bullets, UI options, and backgrounds, all of them were made within the span of the 24 hours afforded to us!!! We managed to implement 3 different player characters, 9 different enemies (3 of which are bosses with a unique attack) and ~10 different bullets. We also added an infinite “arcade mode.” And as an added bonus, the game looks very polished for a hack made in 24 hours thanks to various after effects and tweaks!

What we learned

We learned a lot more about Github and how to use it with Unity (or maybe more accurately: what not to do). We also learned how to delegate work to those who can do it most effectively, and how to let go of perfectionism to make a large amount of assets in a short amount of time- having something done is better than nothing, especially during a time crunch.

What's next for WARmen

We plan to add explanations about the inspirations and themes behind the game in an “About” menu, so that we can publish it to github or itch.io and let other people enjoy the game. We also nearly had a x-box controller-based multiplayer mode working.