Magical Mage Mayhem - Game Designer

Take control of three different mages and duke it out to see who is the best in this multiplayer bullethell, Magical Mage Mayhem! Use magical spells and teleportation magic to out maneuver your enemies and blast them away!

Controls
WASD - Move
Left Click - Use Spells
Right Click - Teleport
Scroll Wheel/1 2 3 - Switch Spells

Design Process
I initially conceived the idea for this game as I thought a Player verses Player bullethell would be really fun! After looking into different bullethell games, a felt like many of them were a bit slower paced, which is something I wanted to avoid with a Player verses Player game. That is when I came up with the teleportation mechanic! If players could teleport, it would increase the pace as their would always be options outside of slowly dodging, and it also gave the players a unique offensive and defensive tool that I had not seen other bullethell games do before.

However, there was an issue where if players could teleport, what would stop them from teleporting behind their enemy and shooting them point-blank? I resolved this issue by implementing an "Anti-Teleport" zone around each mage, so players wouldn't be able to teleport within a certain distance of another character. This also enabled players to theoretically get creative with their strategy and try to block safe areas their enemy might want to teleport with their own fields!

After that, it came down to designing the mages. We settled on a fire, earth, and water mage, primarily due to the fact that we had no artists on the team and had to rely on asset packs. Working with what we had, I designed each mage with a specific playstyle in mind. The fire mage would be shoot lots of small bullets and like to be close up, the earth mage would shoot fewer but larger bullets and like to keep their distance, and the water mage being a middle ground between the two.