Introduction

Since, as of recent, I’ve been working on a top-down shooter in the likes of Nuclear Throne (meets Darkest Dungeon), I decided it’d be a fun and educational exercise to compound a list out of some of the polishing touches I touched upon.

Following Camera and Weapon

Having the gun point towards the way it shoots seems like an obvious addition.

As for the camera, it features two boons I had in mind: the player is able to scout some of the farer reaching areas; and the camera is centered on the action (since shooting is the focus).

The camera’s origin point is ¾ the distance between the player and the cursor.

Weapon Bob and Drag

Weapon bob adds a nice little liveliness, since it mimics breathing. As for the drag, when moving, the weapon lags a bit behind – the effect is barely noticeable, yet adds weight to the weapon.

Big Glowey Bullets

The core aspect of a shooter (in most cases, not all) is the shooting. Shooting means bullets. So that the shooting is as visible as possible, the bullets are big and glowey.

The glow is actually a 0.1 opacity sprite (same as the bullet), twice the bullet’s size.

Gun Effects

Add things like muzzle flashes (meaning a mere white circle combined with the glowing effect described above), on-hit effects (such as a small bop and smoke), bullets moving the flowers and grass they touch. Little things for little joys.

Screen Shake & Kick

A staple of Vlambeer (we all watched The Art of Screenshake at least 4-5 times, haven’t we?), perhaps overused – but holy does it feel amazing.

The screen shake starts with a high value which is decreased over time – the tremor adds to the force of the impact. Same with the kick (which drags the camera towards the opposite direction of the shot) – it adds a sense of velocity and direction.

To keep the sense of force explored consistently, the weapon itself is also kicked back a bit due to recoil.

Self-Knockback

In the previous point I mentioned maintaining consistency in whatever facet one explores when designing. Self-knockback surely does add to the feel of force within those shots, but also deters the run’n’gun experience – since it alters movement.

Whether its addition is a worthy compromise (or, perhaps, none at all, if run’n’gun isn’t the desired playstyle) is up to the developer.

Display & Surrealist Touches

There are many places in which one may choose to display vital information such as health and ammo, each with their own benefits.

Having one close to the character doesn’t require the player to eye some corner and not the action (except for the times when the action is too far from the character).

Since I also wanted to have shells fly out of the gun, I thought it’d be a nice surrealist touch to have it pop out of the ammo display itself.

Another ingredient I personally love to incorporate is permanence – notice that the shells stay on the ground. Even the gun, when reloaded, it is thrown away and another is fetched from the void. However, the danger of excessive permanence is a growing lack of clearness.

Freeze Frames

Yet another staple of Vlambeer (I knew you’d see where this is going straight from the beginning). Freeze frames add a bit of juiciness and abruptness to things. Having it caused by every shot is a bore, however having it caused by enemy deaths and explosions can add not only a sense of importance (since the whole thing stopped due to your actions), but a split second of decision-making as well.

Permanence

I touched upon permanence when mentioning the way I used shells and guns as things to be left on the floor. Things that you can add are blood on-hit, an on-hit white effect, a brief fallback frame before creating a corpse, as well as the ability to move the corpses by shooting them.

Things get shattered, things explode, things get stained – the more the world is affected by your actions, the more you can feel you are able to affect.

Quirkiness

Boomerang-ing bullets, swarming fireballs, angry chickens, health bars (if you perhaps want to go for a grind-through-the-rpg-masses feel) (invest deep thought into whether or not you need one in the first place – if the number of hits required to put down an npc is consistent, perhaps refrain from health bars).

Regardless, quirk it up!

Conclusion

There’s plenty of things you can do with your top-down shooter (or whatever game you might work on and find some of these of use).

I often-times get the feeling that people forget about adding their own spins and flavors when writing a love-letter to their genre of choice. I often-times get the feeling that there’s little spirit found burning within certain games, not due the lack of work (for we all know the drainage and we all know the rush), but due to a lack of revolt against that which we don’t want our game to be.

I wrote this in the hope that it gave someone an even the tiniest of ideas. As for the game I showcased, stay tuned for more to come on Twitter.

Have a good one!