Project Description

Illya is a retro style, shoot-em-up game with minimalistic elements to imitate the virtual realm. I first got inspiration from NierAutomata's hacking minigames, where the three-dimensional space of NierAutomata would turn into a top-down space shooter. It's low-poly aesthetic and minuscule color palette designs were the main inspirations for my game, the other being a slanted perspective view from rhythm games like Tap Tap Revenge. Orginally I had planned to actually make a rhythm game SHMUP but I scratched it as it got too difficult for my current capabilities in Unity, but it's still on the drawing board. The storyboard for the lore of the narrative in Illya was heavily influenced by the song "Sleep Talk" by Zion T. Izabelle, the protagonist of the story, has joined a secret organization specializing in intel on nefarious associations. The catch is that she has her own plans. However, these are things none of the people above and around her know about. What she's after is her mother's work, which specifically has to do with the cloning Artificial intelligence of her sister, Illya. Izabelle doesn't know if she's still alive from her mother's manical experiments, but she's willing to save any piece left of her. Even if she's not real. Eventually her mother's cruelties under the scrutiny of the spy organization and she's given orders to investigate. Izabelle and few other people obtain entry on a public test and she tries to ignore the surrealness of the situation when she takes the elevator many floors underground and sees people similar to her. Each subject enters a testing room with a white-coat leading the single experiment. In the center of the room is reclining chair and a bright lamp overhead, except there's also a suspicious helmet hanging overhead as well. Izabelle is directed into putting on the helmet that allows them to enter their system's virtual world, but, unbeknownst to them, the pupils in her irises begin to rotate with a faint whirrng sound as they transform into a bright magenta color. Her infiltration would begin.

What went right

After having my narrative set, I went straight to UI sketching and the look of my game and how it might be played. I enjoyed making the sprites in my game and I feel that I have definitely improved from my past pixel art games especially because I was working with not only a portrait of Izabelle, but also these abstract depictions of "data" that I really liked how they turned out. I also had a strong point of inspirations this time around mainly from music from Zion T. and Haywyre, whose tracks really fit into this whole hacking scheme, and also visual inspirations from NierAutomata's hacking SHMUP minigames. And because I was running this sort of retro theme it was quite easy to find good sound effects for shooting and destroying particular objects in the game. 

What went wrong

Although I succeeded in creating good sprites, I feel as though I should have made more distinct ones for stages two and three because they share pretty much the same sprites besides the fact that the data collectible is different, so at least I had that to differentiate theme. Since I was using a minimalistic theme to represent my virtual world, I feel like I've missed opportunities to spice up the background more, although I am quite proud of the color transitions that occur with the climax of song. Adding onto the semi-static virtial world,  the AI movements in my SHMUP is also pretty static and the only thing that doesn't just move down are the spawn points in stage 3. I wanted to do more with animations, especially Izabelle's health icon, but I could not get it to work and I wasn't able to get my controller working with the game either. I had many organization issues in my Unity Project as well because of the many prefabs and scrpits I were using for each stage. Using a prefab for the player also created this complication where the animator will only work in stage 1, but not in the other stages.

What I’ve learned

Even though I had strong inspirations I should have focused on what I could create on my own as well. I feel like there should be a balance in that matter and I've definitely had less planning on the core mechanics of this game. Speaking of planning, writing out the things to work on for your game to help calculate how much estimated time would take to complete it is very helpful to understand what you need to work on by a certain and to know potential aspects of your game that might be taken out due to time constraints. I also wished that I had planned the development of Illya better by playtesting certain mechanics in the beginnning, but in other ways I feel like I've done a pretty content job in completing the game by the required time. Of course there are many things that I'd still like to work on and add.

Future Goals

I'd love to add more of the narrative into the game and was even planning on have voice lines and dialogue for each character. And I'm saying each character because I also wanted to add in Izabelle's mother as the stage 4 boss and Illya as the final boss. Although my level of juiciness for feedbacks in my game isn't exactly amazing, I think I'm on the right path. I wish to apply what I've learned from the creation of Illya to my future games and with that I'll reward myself with a drink of milk tea for a job well done.