Battle Starz

Battle Starz is a top down twin stick shooter where you and another friend play as ninjas from Neo-Tokyo in a battle to the death.

This game was created by myself and four other students, in two months, for a school project at Vancouver Film School. It was also the first game I ever made. For this project I took on the roles of project manager and level designer.

Battle Arena

The core game actions of Battle Starz are throwing shurikens, and using portals to teleport shurikens. This was because we wanted players to use portals to perform trick shots to hit their opponents in flashy ways, but after we set up our game's gym we learned that because they added an extra step to hitting your opponent, players didn't have a natural incentive to use them.

So when I sat down to make the levels for the game I designed levels that would push players to interact with the game's portals more. This is the layout for one of the levels I made.

For this level, in order to incentivise the portals, I divided the map in two by placing large pieces of cover in the middle, and the two player spawns on opposite sides. This made direct shots difficult to land, and it created a choke point that would make players easy targets if they tried to cross the divide. Because players had so much cover from direct lines of fire, and because trying to charge their opponent was a risky option, players were pushed to use portals to hit their opponent.

The end result gave a feeling of trying to manage where your opponent could hit you from, while trying to figure out which portal could catch them off guard, which exemplified the feeling of trick shots that we wanted our game to have.

Collaborators