Echoes
Echoes is a top-down, looping shooter. The player attempts to collect three microchips in under a minute while defeating and avoiding enemies.
My main goal was to create an experience that felt good to play and demanded mastery over a loop. It was a great lesson in being flexible with vision and making rapid design decisions.
I designed and developed the game in GameMaker Studio over the course of two weeks.
The Process
My original idea for the concept was inspired heavily by the short story “‘Run',’ Bakri Says.” The short story follows a girl who is trapped in a time loop and attempting to escape. It explores some really interesting ideas about immortality, and I wanted to do the same with this prototype.
Since the prototype was an assignment for a Level Design class, the narrative needed to take a backseat. I focused on simple mechanics and game feel. I wanted things to feel fast paced and sticky. When the player died, which was meat to occur often, I wanted them to immediately pop back into the action.
In my first pass, there was a lot more random enemy fire in tight spaces. I thought having the player die right away would give them a better idea as to what the game was about. However, this felt bad. I opted to instead expand the space, and lean more into trying to figure out an optimal path. There were still lots of enemy interactions, but now players could plan a little better.
To assist with this, I spent some time developing a mechanic that would display the players previous run. A shadow of the player sprite would appear, and players could watch their previous run while attempting a new one. I added this so players could know where they were going, and know where they shouldn’t be if they want to have a successful run.
Lessons Learned
Overall this process really gave me confidence in my abilities to develop a project quickly. It was fun to try and bring things together in a short period of time. It was a good exercise in focusing on mechanics as narrative and trying to tell a story with the gameplay.
I am really proud of how the prototype turned out. I would love to revisit the project one day and add some real assets. I think it could make for quite a fun little game.
