
Mystic Bard
A shoot 'em up game I made on the processing engine. The first game I developed. In the game, you play as a magical bard who defends a village from monsters. In it, you shoot up enemies using instruments as weapons by clicking on them using your mouse's left click. The weapons need to be reloaded after being used several times, like in other shooter, so the players need to be cautious with how they use their weapons. However, unlike most other shooters, you can interrupt enemy attacks.

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Players can defend themselves by using a shield that also needs to be reloaded after several uses or by attacking an enemy right before they land an attack to interrupt them. My motivation for developing this game was to practice writing enemy artificial intelligence and create a battle system that is fast-paced but requires players to manage their resources in their weapon usage. A shooter was a good medium for this, because, shooters are fast paced and requires you to manage your ammo. They are also easy for me to develop, because I simply have to program enemies reacting to getting clicked on. The mechanic of being able to interrupt enemies is my way to put some uniqueness in this genre of game, because most shooting games don't have enemies flinch from attacks. In most shooters, enemies don't react to getting shot, and it is very hard not to get hit by enemies, especially if you are trying to shoot them. This gives my game a more tactical edge.
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One of the challenges I faced while developing this game was the storage limitation. The processing engine can't use more than 12000 MB of data, so I needed to shrink the art assets several times. Each enemy sprite is only 20 KB in size as a result. Enemy art assets are from a game called Final Fantasy IV for the Nintendo DS. The rest of the art is art I made using Adobe Photoshop and the sound effects are sounds I made using Audacity. Click on the top image to download the files for the game or download the repository for the game on my GitHub account from the link below.