Skills and Tools
Unity
- Creating Prefabs
- Managing game objects and scripts
Visual Studio Code
- Programming Behaviors and Mechanics
- Debugging
Game Concept
Joseph Kills Lucy is a boss rush game with a rhythm-hybrid based combat system, where players must attack on beat with the music to fight back against the boss. Additionally, pressing the combat buttons in a particular pattern creates combos which have special effects, such as creating stronger attacks or shielding the player. Inspired by grunge music and the subgenre of Isekai games/manga, the player must fight within a dystopian abandoned city where hostile bosses awaits them.
Itch Link
The prototype of this game is available for download at https://noggindecay.itch.io/joseph-kills-lucy. You will also find more in depth documentation on the itch page.
Plans for the Future
The intended final game is meant to center around Lucy and their journey into a different world (or being Isekai'd). In the real world, Lucy is part of a grunge band and one day, Lucy gets run over by their tour bus and finds themselves in this new hostile dystopian world. As Lucy defeats the bosses, more lore is meant to be dropped that provides hints to the player as to who was responsible for the attempted murder of Lucy. The player will know that suspect's name is 'Joseph', but the humor is that several characters have names similar to or are variations of Joseph, such as 'Joe', 'Josephine', 'Giuseppe', and 'Yousef'. This game is meant to have a lot of humor and lore while still providing the player with challenging gameplay. Since we were only a team of 4, and we only had one school semester (4 months) to work on this game, the final deliverable is still just a prototype.
The Team
This project would not have been possible without the contributions of each member of the team. We each contributed something unique to the team and because we have a lot of experience working together, we were able to communicate and cooperate effectively.
Systems Overview
My role in this project was to be the primary programmer. I was in charge of scripting player movement, instantiating projectiles, boss attack patterns, missed attack feedback, conductor class that kept track of the song's BPM, attack indicators, some UI elements, simple inputs, combo system, pause and end game features, coroutines, and collision detection/ignoring. Naturally, this also meant that I spent a lot of time debugging. While these were all the scripts I was able to get into the prototype, there are still many systems and behaviors that need to be added or improved for a more polished game.
These include more complex boss patterns/behaviors, implementing Unity's new input system for compatibility with controllers, reworking combo system, creating a polished battle interface, adding cutscenes and dialogue, adding dynamic soundtracks that change based on player inputs, and more dynamic camera movement.
Here is a playlist of the progress videos:
To open on YouTube, click here.