Bulleta Magika is a bullet hell video game designed and developed for the 32-bit jam. All the work was done during a month, but most of it was done during the last two weeks.

The theme of the 32-bit jam was to make a game from the PSX era: 240p, lowpoly, unfiltered textures, etc. It was streamed on Twitch by RookRules.

What went right?

Story

In this game, you play as Bulletta, a magical dinosaur girl that can control time thanks to the "Artifact of Many Minutes and a Couple of Hours". If that's not enough, you can shoot your enemies using your normal magic powers.

Even when the character and story was added during the last few days, it was well received by the streamer. The silliness of the story made the game funnier and more interesting overall.

Polished game

One month for a game jam it’s a lot, and it gave us time to polish the game, both graphics and sound. There weren’t a lot of bugs, and the game feels that it is finished, even when it’s short.

I think the key to achieve this was better planning compared to the previous jam. Obviously, having one month also makes a lot of difference; but we planned to have a tutorial, 1-2 bosses, two time-related mechanics and an opening and ending scene, and we delivered all of it but two bosses.

What went wrong?

32-bit Aesthetic

As the streamer said, the game didn’t feel like a PSX-era game. We went for a 2D-pixel art aesthetic with some 3D models because we didn’t have experience working in a full 3D environment, and that was the main problem. Anyway, at least it was a good experiment for me, as I learned some basics of working with 3D models on Unity.

Gameplay

The gameplay felt dull for me. I wanted a fast gameplay that rewarded the player for dodging the bullets, but I think it didn’t feel like that. The main issue for this was the size of Bulleta, that limited the amount of bullets we could spawn on screen. Also, that we spent most of the time on the graphic part rather than the game design.

Another issue was the reverse time mechanic. It was added so it made the gameplay a bit more unique, but I think it was kind of clunky. Maybe with a better overall gameplay, the mechanic would feel more rewarding.