The Revolver Game

The Revolver game was a class project in Unity I made with a classmate Ethan my sophomore year. He did the coding, I did the art, and We collaborated on the mechanics and the story.

The original idea for the game was a roguelike where the player character had ended up in an inescapable dungeon with a revolver that only had 6 bullets, so the player could only use 6 bullets until the player died and the roguelike restarted. To be able to kill more than six enemies while only having six bullets, the player would have to gain magical power-ups that allowed the player to take bullets back if they did certain things like kill 3 creatures with one shot or took more than 10 points of damage.

This then morphed into the bullets changing by putting the souls of the monster you killed in them. Once you died, the monsters that were infused in your bullets would give you a certain amount of soul points which you could use to upgrade the player’s stats.

Another thing was that I wanted the dungeon to be alive. In many rouge-likes, the dungeon will be randomized by making many different types of rooms and then randomizing the connection of those rooms. I thought it would be cool to make it so that as players came back to the same room, things about the room would change. For instance, if you killed the goblin king in one room and then later stumbled upon that same room, you would find the goblin king’s citizens in the process of making a new society where they were in the process of making a statue of the player for saving them from their tyrant king. I wanted the dungeon to change as time went on.

This was supported by another idea that when the player died, they didn’t revive, they just took over another body after their previous characters death. That previous character would be cemented into the story of the game with NPC’s that you made an impact on in your previous playthroughs talking about the recently dead character.

I knew that many of these Ideas would not be made, but I wanted to dream of what the game could be.

There was also going to be little secrets depending on the directions you went in the dungeon.

The Final game mechanic ended up being that the player had six bullets that would run out, but the player could gain bullets back by collecting the souls of their enemies. Depending on how quickly the player could collect the soul, the more bullets the player could gain back. Since the player had to get up close with the enemy’s body, this would force the player who could shoot at long range to get up close and personal with enemies.

The game’s original name was going to be Revolve, which was based on the player’s main weapon and the game’s thematic ideas.

It was originally going to be about how much it sucked for both the player character and the NPC’s to be stuck in a cycle of fighting and recovering going through the dungeon over and over again without feeling like they made any progress to getting out. Being stuck in a cycle.

The gun was going to be named Sisyphus, another reference to the repeating cycle.