Description

Survive as many waves of the Prismatic Horde as you can. You have your choice of four weapons: The tried and true pistol, the pray and spray machine gun, the apocalypses favorite shotgun, and of course a laser cannon. Pick up health and ammo along the way to avoid having to resort to your melee knife attack. The longer you survive the more of the horde will start coming in each wave so suit up, grab an ammo pack, your favorite weapon, and make your final stand against the Prismatic Horde.

When your inevitable death comes kick back and enjoy an excessive amount of stats about how badly you lost, and what rotten luck you had! The horde was probably laughing at you, or they would be if they had mouths. How far will you go?

Screenshots

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My Role

Despite this being a solo project, I had a friend help me with some of the art, namely the player character. The music was taken from an older title of mine that has since been lost to time. The floor and wall texture were free open license assets. Other than that, the rest was done by me.

Lessons Learned

What I learned from this is that you should simply do. You can spend days coming up with ideas, writing them down, drawing up world maps, but that doesn't result in a game. Making a game results in a game. Often time you'll spend so much time planning you will venture outside your scope, or abandon said idea. Having something to prototype, concept, and share goes a lot farther than pen and paper.

Development

Prismatic Horde was developed in one sleepless night. We were supposed to come up with pitches for small games in our introductory game class but, seeing how my insomnia was keeping me from a good night's sleep, I decided to stay up all night making this!

The develpment was quick and simple. The enemy AI simply walks toward you and attacks, the challenge comes from their mass numbers. All projectiles follow the same logic at varying speeds and spread, which allowed me to add in a few guns before the sun came up.

Prismatic horde was named for its colorful enemies. It came from a lack of time to create new art assets, so I simply made several alien variants and had them randomly colorized in code. The result was a very odd assortment of colors which became the game's most easily recognized feature.

The inclusion of only one ammo type was deliberate. I found it far more enjoyable to use different guns for different purposes. The pistol is the most accurate, the assault rifle does more damage per second but consumes more ammo, the shotgun is great for one hit kills or heards, and the laser is a laser. Because the ammo pool is shared, you can use whatever gun you want for the situation, but it will cost you more resources if you aren't efficient with your use.

The game contains several exploits, which were never fixed nor caught in the initial development due to the time constraint and lack of testers aside from myself. The horde avoids ammo and health pickups, allowing the player to use them as barricades.

Notes

Controls

W, A, S, D: Movement
Left click: Shoot
Right click: Knife attack
Scroll wheel: Change weapon
1: Pistol
2: Shotgun
3: Assault Rifle
4: Laser
Space: Pause / Unpause
Esc: Quit

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