Footgun Underground

You can buy the game on Steam and for your Nintendo Switch!
Unfortuanetly I cant share any code on this project.

I had the great opportunity to work for the German indie studio Turtle Knight Games on an official game, which financed my studies for nearly a year. When it was released, it received many positive feedback from players on Steam.

I contributed by implementing various mechanics, including special ball types, characters, items, enemy behaviors, and much more. I was even given the chance to design three of the ten bosses in the game.

Our team consisted of four programmers, one pixel artist, one sound designer, and the publisher CobraTekku, who handled marketing.

Overview:

Parttime-job (08.2023 – 06.2024)
Official steam-released Indie-title
Role: gameplay programmer (C#)
Engine: Unity

Important Learnings:

Working on a complete game
Well thought-through architecture
Solid team member knowledge, many cool discussions
Lots of AI-behaviour
GamesCom booth
Stress before release
Debugging

Publicity

One of my favorit German YouTubers, „HandOfBlood“ played the game!
Since we got promoted by the German „Hessenagentur“ we also had the possibility to get a booth at the GamesCom.

List of things I did (most are shown in Showreel above):

Type	Name	Description
Balls	Axe Ball	Gets stuck in the wall and returns to you after a delay
	Identity Ball	Generates light lines between wall hits
	Chomp Ball	Several bites follow after the enemy is hit
	Wrapper Ball (Special)	Wraps around another ball, adding all ball chips to it
	Wall Canon Ball	Wraps around another ball, adding all ball chips to it
	Bolt Ball	Constantly tries to dodge. Deals great damage on direct hit
Ball Chips	Wall ScaleUp	Scales up when it hits a wall while active
	Enemy Marker	Enemy receives double damage on hit for a brief duration
	Ground Pound	Hitting the ceiling causes the ball to Ground Pound for increased damage
	Gravity Scale	Reduced gravity while in active mode
Character Chips	Shield	Gain a shield that blocks one incoming attack
	Pound Jump	Deal damage upon landing on enemies
	Ball Return Teleport	Ball teleports back to you at slow speed
	Midair Trick-Shot	Earn extra money for killing enemies with mid-air ball kicks
	Grounded	Kick gains strength after time on the ground
	Overcharge	Doubles the charge capacity
Enemies	Bomb Dropper	Flies horizontally and drops bombs frequently
	Slime Crawler	Crawls at the edge of the walls, drops obstacles
	Rope Enemy	Drops from ceiling, shoots in all directions and goes back
Bosses	Big Nut
	Fortress
	Giant Divider Slime
More	Enemy HP Bar	Shows enemy HP on hit
	Enemy RageMode System	Every enemy can get into rage mode after amount of time with specific behaviours
	Difficulty System	Difficulty increases over biotope-exchange. Difficulty scales enemy-specific parameters.
	Difficulty System	Difficulty increases over biotope-exchange. Difficulty scales enemy-specific parameters.
	Boss Death Remainder System	A fun system in which we could implement remainders for all the explosions of bosses
	Insta-Kill for all bosses	Insta-Kill Bosses in UnityEditor for debugging
	Inventory in shop	You can show your inventory in the shop
	Breakable Tile System	For the breakable tile special stage
	Player Gravity Ability	A reverse skill used by specific characters to use a gravity field instead of shooting away the ball

Debugging:

Debugging was a crucial part of the development process. Especially in the final stages of the project, we did extensive testing with various character setups that players could create, uncovering a lot of unforeseen behavior.

One specific matrix I developed proved to be extremely useful in tracking down a significant number of bugs. It systematically checked interactions between every ball with special behavior (e.g., kinematics on/off switches) and various level objects that could influence ball behavior (e.g., velocity changes, teleportation, blocking).

Our task was to analyze each field in this matrix during the special states of the balls (e.g., when the wall cannon is attached to a wall and firing) and document whether it functioned correctly or if edge cases happened.

Footgun Underground

You can buy the game on Steam and for your Nintendo Switch!Unfortuanetly I cant share any code on this project.

I had the great opportunity to work for the German indie studio Turtle Knight Games on an official game, which financed my studies for nearly a year. When it was released, it received many positive feedback from players on Steam.

I contributed by implementing various mechanics, including special ball types, characters, items, enemy behaviors, and much more. I was even given the chance to design three of the ten bosses in the game.

Our team consisted of four programmers, one pixel artist, one sound designer, and the publisher CobraTekku, who handled marketing.

Overview:

Parttime-job (08.2023 – 06.2024)

Official steam-released Indie-title

Role: gameplay programmer (C#)

Engine: Unity

Important Learnings:

Working on a complete game

Well thought-through architecture

Solid team member knowledge, many cool discussions

Lots of AI-behaviour

GamesCom booth

Stress before release

Debugging

Publicity

One of my favorit German YouTubers, „HandOfBlood“ played the game!Since we got promoted by the German „Hessenagentur“ we also had the possibility to get a booth at the GamesCom.

List of things I did (most are shown in Showreel above):

Balls

Axe Ball

Gets stuck in the wall and returns to you after a delay

Identity Ball

Generates light lines between wall hits

Chomp Ball

Several bites follow after the enemy is hit

Wrapper Ball (Special)

Wraps around another ball, adding all ball chips to it

Wall Canon Ball

Wraps around another ball, adding all ball chips to it

Bolt Ball

Constantly tries to dodge. Deals great damage on direct hit

Ball Chips

Wall ScaleUp

Scales up when it hits a wall while active

Enemy Marker

Enemy receives double damage on hit for a brief duration

Ground Pound

Hitting the ceiling causes the ball to Ground Pound for increased damage

Gravity Scale

Reduced gravity while in active mode

Character Chips

Shield

Gain a shield that blocks one incoming attack

Pound Jump

Deal damage upon landing on enemies

Ball Return Teleport

Ball teleports back to you at slow speed

Midair Trick-Shot

Earn extra money for killing enemies with mid-air ball kicks

Grounded

Kick gains strength after time on the ground

Overcharge

Doubles the charge capacity

Enemies

Bomb Dropper

Flies horizontally and drops bombs frequently

Slime Crawler

Crawls at the edge of the walls, drops obstacles

Rope Enemy

Drops from ceiling, shoots in all directions and goes back

Bosses

Big Nut

Fortress

Giant Divider Slime

More

Enemy HP Bar

Shows enemy HP on hit

Enemy RageMode System

Every enemy can get into rage mode after amount of time with specific behaviours

Difficulty System

Difficulty increases over biotope-exchange. Difficulty scales enemy-specific parameters.

Difficulty System

Difficulty increases over biotope-exchange. Difficulty scales enemy-specific parameters.

Boss Death Remainder System

A fun system in which we could implement remainders for all the explosions of bosses

Insta-Kill for all bosses

Insta-Kill Bosses in UnityEditor for debugging

You can buy the game on Steam and for your Nintendo Switch!
Unfortuanetly I cant share any code on this project.

One of my favorit German YouTubers, „HandOfBlood“ played the game!
Since we got promoted by the German „Hessenagentur“ we also had the possibility to get a booth at the GamesCom.