Gun Groove Alley is a rhythm tower defence game in which every aspect moves to the beat of the music. You assist a gang of back-alley cats defending their stolen treasure stash from various disgruntled scoundrels. Made for ScoreSpace Jam #27, the game finished in the top 20. We returned to it a few weeks later and delivered a full post-jam update, reworking over 50% of the artwork, adding a new character type, new music and SFX, and completely overhauling the wave system.
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The jam version used simple sprite animations to get characters bopping to the beat, and we flipped sprites to handle aiming. For the post-jam update, all characters were rebuilt in Spine, a piece of skeletal animation software that gave them significantly more personality. Characters now flip in a Paper Mario-style and physically aim their weapons at their current target. I implemented bone position control in code to achieve the dynamic aiming, which was new territory for me and something I've since used on other projects.
The jam version handled waves by spawning a slightly incrementing set of enemies each round, chosen randomly from a pool. For the update we scrapped this and hand-crafted 25 waves using Scriptable Objects, each containing three pieces of data: a Hint string displayed before the wave begins (prioritised in a queue if filled in, shown in green for important warnings), a Beats value specifying when enemies spawn during the wave to allow flexible pacing, and a set of WaveSteps, which are structs defining the exact enemy composition at each spawn point within the wave. To keep things going past wave 25, I wrote a generator function that takes the final wave as a reference, shuffles and duplicates its WaveSteps, and assembles a new Wave Scriptable Object at runtime, producing increasingly large and difficult waves procedurally.
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