Mindhunter

Mindhunter is a game where you fight against waves of enemies.

The enemies are based on the Seven Deadly Sins. It targets hardcore players who are determined to beat every game because this game is really hard to beat and needs time and practice.

You not only have to defend yourself but also your stationary brain which shares a health bar with you.

While defending your life you also have to manage your sanity because it affects your vision range and the enemies attacking prioritization.

This project is also uploaded on itch.io.

Genre: Hack ´n´ Slash, Roguelike

target audience: hardcore player, achiever

Platform: PC

Team size: 9

Duration: 3 months

Roles: game design, programming, team management

School project

OVERVIEW

Download Prototype

GAME DESIGN

As one of the core mechanics, I introduced the idea of a mobile character that shares his health bar with a stationary object which in our case is a brain, that has no possibility to defend itself on its own. Your health is not your only issue you also lose Sanity over time which reduces your Vision. The enemies will always prioritize following and attacking you over your brain but only if you can see them.
With gold that is dropped from killing the enemies you can get a sanity pill that fills up your sanity and you can also buy a heal to fill up missing health points. It´s a constant weighing of what is more important to survive now, more health or vision. Because defending the enemies when they start going for the brain is quite challenging.

Storydesign

Backstory

it all takes place in the 21 century the only big difference from our world is the connection to the Seven Deadly Sins.
Every sin that a person commits during his lifetime is punished as soon as he dies by the personifications of the sins in a nightmarish manner.
Until one day more and more people fall into a kind of sleep, for no apparent reason.
These "sleeping" people are artificially kept alive, fed and supplied with minerals.
It doesn´t take long until the first person slowly awakes but it seems like he has lost his humanity.
He is possessed, trying to destroy and kill everything around him, and gradually more and more such creatures wake up.
The doctors call this phenomenon the "demon plague".
A parasitc demon that stole the Seven Deadly Sins power tweaked its way into people's brains and began to break their souls, the human that was in this body before is long gone.
Over and over again, the infested people go through the same nightmare. They are trapped in their own mind and have to stand up in a fight against the Seven Deadly Sins.
But it is more than just a nightmare, with each death, the infected lose a part of their soul, their spirit, their identity.
So the more often this dream was repeated the closer the person was to having their spirit broken, allowing the demon parasite to gain full control and use them as a vessel.
The more sins a person has committed in his life, be it even a small inconspicuous lie, the easier it is for the demon to break that spirit.

Storyline

He is a shy little teenage boy who believes kindness is the key to everything. He never even told a white lie or killed a bug.
This makes it possible for the demon to infiltrate his soul but there is no decay of his spirit whatsoever.
No matter how many times he died in his mind Aren gets back up just as strong as before.
All that is great but doesn't change the fact that he is now trapped in his head seemingly forever, fighting this demon.
What Aren doesn't know in the beginning is, that even the demon has its limit if Aren persistently defends himself the enemy will show his true self and then be defeated once and for all.
Our Protagonist and Hero Aren gets infected too.
But what now, will humanity be destroyed?

I also took part in balancing the game, overviewing everything and making the game fitting for our main target audience.

PROGRAMMING

Simple Enemy State Machine

To make sure the enemy would attack the player as soon as he entered its range I created a state machine with an enum for the enemies. So now I could overview what action which enemy was executing. This helped me manage how the enemies would react to certain interactions.

The enemy can either walk, charge his attack, be knocked or be dead
If they are knocked back or dead they immediately stop all the other routines as attacking
Like this I could also easily control the animations
This works for each individual enemy because they have their own state machine object attached

Shared health bar + Sanity

Dash

I also worked with a state machine for the player movement to track which action he was executing. Like this I could stop further movement or turning while the player dashed. I also introduced a serialized variable that controls the length of I-Frames(invincible Frames) the player has after dashing. With the help of these I-Frames the Player can catch bullets, or to get over the map faster.

Enemy Spawner

the different enemy types were supposed to spawn randomly from random spawn points in waves. I made everything accessible from the inspector so the level design and balancing would be easier. In the inspector you can choose which enemy types spawns in which wave by dragging the required enemy prefab in a list, how many enemies spawn from which wave in general, the waves name and a list where you can add your transforms to set the spawn points.