Midnight at the Disco
Annihilate massive hordes of evil alien eyeball monsters as you struggle to survive a full day on the dance floor. Choose from a diverse set of character traits, weapons and upgrades to create unique builds on each run to blast the baddies into oblivion. Midnight at the Disco is a top down rouge-like shooter with heavy influence from the Bullet Heaven and Bullet Hell genres. Oh, and there's poop.
Devlog #0
Gameplay
Each run starts with selecting a primary weapon card from 3 randomly generated choices. Then the player selects a secondary weapon from 3 new randomly generated choices. Some of these weapons have a primary and secondary fire mode, others do not. All of them use the players regenerating eyeballs as ammunition.
From there the player selects two starting items in a similar fashion. Items do things like increase critical hit chance or movement speed.
Finally, they select a special ability card such as bullet-time, dash, or a deadly spinning dance move.
With the starting character build chosen, the player can now travel to one of 3 discos (assuming they are all unlocked) or the armory (see meta progression below for more on the armory).
Now the fun starts. The player is tasked with surviving from midnight to midnight the following day in the chosen disco. Each minute equates to 1 hour so a run will last no longer than 24 total minutes. That is if the player can survive that long...
The basic combat consists of using your weapons and abilities to mow down hordes of progressively difficult enemies. Unlike most games in the bullet heaven or survivors-like genre, the player fires their primary and secondary weapons manually, and the enemies are a bit more complicated than just mindless drones who do nothing more than move towards the player. Think something similar to a top-down 2d version of Risk of Rain 2. This makes for a much more engaging combat system than other games in the genre.
Don't worry though, there will be plenty of upgrades to live out that power fantasy. Every killed enemy has a chance to drop xp and the player will level up several times per minute.
Each time the player levels up they are immediately presented with a minimum of 3 upgrade choices. These upgrade choices are not limited to boring auto-fire weapons or simple stat increases (though there are some of those too). They include things like giving explosions a chance to launch a fireball which inflicts burn on enemies or freezing all nearby enemies when poop is destroyed. The player can than use their intellect to select the best synergies from the available upgrades. For example, if the player has the aforementioned upgrade which gives explosions a chance to launch fireballs, a good synergy would be the upgrade which causes burning enemies to explode. When these burning enemies explode they launch fireballs which in turn cause enemies to burn, thereby causing a never ending cycle of death and destruction.
When you pause the game you can totally nerd out on stats too.
Meta Progression
In between runs you can purchase permanent buffs at the armory with currency gained during runs.
There are also several unlockables such as weapons, items and new discos that can be unlocked by completing certain tasks.
Biggest Influences
- Risk of Rain 2
- Vampire Survivors
- 20 Minutes Till Dawn
- Binding of Isaac
Credits
I am a solo developer living in Montana USA. I plan to contract out the killer disco soundtrack, but other than that this is a one man team.
Game Engine: Godot 3.5.1
Platforms: PC (Windows, Mac, Linux)
Join the discord: Discord.gg
Twitter: Twitter.com
Email: Taphouse.Games.MT@gmail.com
Anyway, that's my game in its current very unfinished state. I'll update my progress and highlight other mechanics of the game here every once in a while. Thanks for reading.
