The original idea for the game was “Pac-Man with guns”. So obviously Pac-Man **was a huge inspiration for the game. And a cool constraint too: I thought about adding many different enemies, with big and small versions of the ghosts that would move faster, spawn other ghosts, shoot bullets and lasers and do many other things; with lots of different weapons and levels. I could maybe make a roguelike with a boss fight for each of the original Pac-Man ghosts. But I decided that it was better to keep the scope low, this is a little portfolio project to show my documentation skills after all, and for it to be a little arcade game that humbly asks the question “What if Pac-Man had a fing Gun?*”.

Also, some of the basic mechanics of Pac-Man happened to align really well with some of the core pillars of my game’s gameplay. I wanted the player to be constantly moving. And the Pac-Man’s dots are actually a really good mechanic to make the player move all around the map.

Nuclear Throne was the other great inspiration for the gameplay. I wanted to recreate that fast and intense moment-to-moment experience where you are constantly shooting and moving around to avoid enemies.

I also looked at Nuclear Throne for its game feel. I love the topic of game feel and I really like to pay close attention to it. Not only screen shake but hit-stop, particles, the timing of each element and movement, or the sound and animations. For this game I wanted each gun to feel powerful and cool. I tried for shooting to be fun even when shooting at nothing in an empty room. But I tried for even the little things, like picking up an ammo package, to have some coolness to it.

I also borrowed a little mechanic for Hyper Demon, a game from the creators of Devil Daggers. Which is also a “survive as much as you can” type of game. Hyper Demon does this thing that takes score away from you as time goes by. And I added it to Guns ‘N’ Ghosts because is a great way to encourage the player to constantly seek for points, penalizing them if they don’t maintain a constant flux of score. Which, again, makes the player move around.

Guns ‘N’ Ghosts has a slower pace than those games. But I also tried to create the gameplay loop they have that has you playing fast, dying fast and retrying fast.

And finally, I’d like to mention Downwel. Downwell is a small game that does great things with very little. It has a small variety of weapons that are very different from one another. And I tried to also have that small arsenal where no two guns are played in the same way, but mixing it with Nuclear Throne where you can also have some more powerful and crazy effects from time to time. I ended up with a system that has more simple guns appear more often and some weird and powerful ones appear less. So you are usually playing with the classic machine gun or shotgun but from time to time you get some weapon that allows you to easily clean the screen or has you playing in a weird way because your bullets can also damage you.

See the full list of guns from here: GunsNGhosts/Guns

Downwell also links the act of changing your gun to other effects. The packages that change your gun will also heal you or increase your maximum ammo. So if you want those benefits, you also need to change your gun. And changing your gun means that you now need to adapt to a different play style. For my game, I wanted to bring that need to adapt your playstyle to the center of the experience and make the player constantly change to different weapons. I essentially linked it to your reload. You can not get ammo back without changing your gun. So basically, every time you reload you play with a different gun.

And those are the ingredients that I used for the Guns ‘N’ Ghosts recipe!