Concept
RailGun is an isometric shooter roguelike. The player controls an engineer fighting against aliens that have taken over a space train to try and regain control. If they fail the train will fly off course into a sun destroying the train and killing everyone on board. While traversing the train the player can find upgrades that will improve the player's character to make them more prepared for stronger foes.
Boss Development and Implementation
Bosses were something that I spent the most time designing and implementing into the game. These required me to come up with thematic designs for the aliens that were invading the train and making unique attacks that differed them from the base enemies. As an example, the final boss was derived as a core for the hive mind like aliens and attacked like it assimilated the entire train car. This meant allowing its weak point to move around the entire field and making it so that its attacks could come from anywhere in the care. Then as it was the core it was given the ability to spawn in basic enemies to try and defend itself.
My Role
My role on this project was to design enemies for the player to face. This meant designing both normal enemies and bosses. In the back half of the project, my role switched more to helping implement those designs through programming a pair of boss fights and aspects of the basic enemies.
What I Learned
The biggest thing I learned was to adapt to the team that you have and fill in where needed. As someone who has both experience in programming and design, this meant switching from a designer in the first half of the project to a programmer in the back half. This happened because our programmers needed assistance to get everything into the game by the deadline. We did not expect this to happen and was a decision that was made quickly as we realized where we needed more manpower.