Gates of Yomi
Gates of Yomi is a bullet-heaven roguelite where you cut your way out of the underworld against escalating swarms of enemies, building up a run with every weapon and upgrade you pick along the way to your survival.
Gates of Yomi in mid-run: top-down bullet-heaven combat at night among red torii gates, the player surrounded by approaching underworld enemies.
Gates of Yomi was the first project I ever worked on at a larger scale as a game developer, a bullet-heaven roguelite that I designed and built together with Frog on Fire. It was a great learning experience and a lot of fun: I architected all of the systems and built small tools along the way. As both my friend and I gained more experience, we decided not to continue with the project and took on more exciting challenges in our careers.
Here are a few of the works that went into it:
- Built the core bullet-heaven loop, where the player shreds through waves of enemies piling onto them nonstop while they keep gaining upgrades and abilities to fight through them.
- Wrote a unique enemy spawning system where the game itself decided what to spawn and when to spawn with a credit-based system, keeping the game matching the player’s tempo and each run unique.
- Enemy and player behavior runs on a hierarchical state machine, which kept the logic readable and easy to extend as I added new enemy types and behaviors.
- Backed the project with a suite of 53 GUT unit tests covering the core systems, so I could refactor freely without breaking things I had already gotten working.
- The whole project’s version control was handled by me alone.
Gates of Yomi was the first project I ever worked on at a larger scale as a game developer, a bullet-heaven roguelite that I designed and built together with Frog on Fire. It was a great learning experience and a lot of fun: I architected all of the systems and built small tools along the way. As both my friend and I gained more experience, we decided not to continue with the project and took on more exciting challenges in our careers.
Here are a few of the works that went into it:
Gameplay
- Built the core bullet-heaven loop, where the player shreds through waves of enemies piling onto them nonstop while they keep gaining upgrades and abilities to fight through them.
- Wrote a unique enemy spawning system where the game itself decided what to spawn and when to spawn with a credit-based system, keeping the game matching the player’s tempo and each run unique.
Architecture
- Enemy and player behavior runs on a hierarchical state machine, which kept the logic readable and easy to extend as I added new enemy types and behaviors.
- Backed the project with a suite of 53 GUT unit tests covering the core systems, so I could refactor freely without breaking things I had already gotten working.
Git version control
- The whole project’s version control was handled by me alone.
