Hellix
In between the fall and spring semesters of junior year, myself and a group of friends wanted to get together to make a game. Partially as practice for our upcoming semester of collaborative game dev with our peers, but also mainly just for fun.
We knew we’d have to start after the holidays, and wanted to wrap it up before the spring semester really kicked off. We settled on signing up for the 2025 edition of the Boss Rush Game Jam, a jam that focuses on games in which the primary game mode is boss rush plus the creators’ creative take on the theme. This year, the theme was “Spin”. We had roughly four weeks to make a game that fit that bill.
I remember wanting at the time to come up with ways that we could differentiate ourselves in the competition, and hopefully stand out a bit more. An idea popped into my head, and I couldn’t shake it: “What would a non-violent bullet hell shooter look like? What if the game is about cleansing or binding, rather than outright killing?”
Year : 2025
Genre: Boss Rush
Platform: PC
Developed In: Unity 5
Team Size: 6
The initial pitch of Hellix
The designers on the team liked the idea enough to workshop it, and thus the above presentation was created to pitch the idea to the rest of the team. They gave their thumbs up, and we were off to the races.
You’ll have to forgive me for a general lack of design documents from this point onwards, as the team quickly shifted to simply making the game given the time constraints we were working under. However, I’ll talk about highlights of the game’s design that I’m proud we tackled, as I really do think we were able to make something unique within the genre.
The opening level of Hellix
First was our focus on creating a non-violent bullet hell style game. This created a few design constraints, first and foremost being that the player’s character shouldn’t be outright attacking the game’s bosses. We still needed a way for them to affect the boss however, so thus we decided to make their primary way of opposing the bosses to be "binding” or sealing them away, like an exorcist would a demon.
Secondly, we then wanted the bosses’ attacks to be more focused on preventing the player from completing their objective, rather than outright killing the player. So, whenever the player is hit by one of the enemy projectiles, they are pushed backwards, off of the sealing points of the binding circles.
Combine this with an encroaching darkness that does kill you if you stay in it for too long, the player is incentivized to always balance the need to dodge the projectiles and to stay on the sealing points in order to beat the boss.
The second boss of Hellix
Ah, but which sealing points do you target first? We wanted there to be reasons why you would focus on specific sealing points first, rather than just standing still and waiting for the circles to rotate towards you. To that end, we created a rune system.
In each sealing point, there is a certain rune; when points that haven’t been sealed yet reach a certain zone (more in with each boss), their runes get activated. These buffs help the boss, by speeding up their attack rate, affecting the speed of the projectiles, or the pushback force of the projectiles.
Thus, it’s up to the player to decide which particular runes they want to focus on first. Perhaps they’re having particular trouble with the rate of attacks, or perhaps they’re finding it hard to recover from the stronger projectiles. Either way, it’s their choice of what to focus on first!
Our team had a blast working on the game, and were proud of how it turned out, even if we didn’t end up winning anything in the jam. And hey, someone tipped us seven bucks, so now we can officially say we’ve been paid to make a video game, and that’s pretty neat.
The game is playable in-browser or free to download on Itch, so give it a try!
The team’s logo (we didn’t even have team name we were so tired at the end)
Design:
James Johnson
Benton Lane
Amalia Russell
Art & Animation:
Taylor Harrington
Amalia Russell
Olivia Santamauro
Programming:
James Johnson
Sound & Music:
Morgan Smith