Feral Weapon

Programming, Game Design, Music

"Feral Weapon" is a game about managing an over-abundant resource - one's own power. The Feral Weapon is an orbital cannon designed to defend humanity from a non-specific enemy out to destroy it. The gameplay is similar to Missile Command in that it involves defending the player's cities, and that it is impossible to win, and the only feasible achievement is surviving longer than last time. The player aims the Feral Weapon by touching the screen, and fires it by releasing. The crosshair is set slightly above the touch point, to avoid obstructing the view with one's finger.

The twist is that the Feral Weapon has a mind of its own. It constantly charges up, with a higher charge meaning a larger area of impact. When it reaches full charge, it fires to a random location on the map and starts over. Every time that the Feral Weapon is fired, its charge times is decreased, which means that eventually the Feral Weapon will destroy everything and everyone on the map, ending the game. The player is tasked with holding off the enemy forces while firing as little as possible, to delay this inevitable doom.

"Feral Weapon" has a dynamic music system. Each level’s corresponding musical track is separated into three synchronous layers. The tracks begins playing when the first shot is fired, with just the first layer audible. The number of shots also triggers layers 2 & 3 later on, to give a sense of musical progression. The music also subtly rises in pitch with every shot, to match the shorter charge cycles and growing tension. When a level ends, the music's pitch slides down sharply - just how sharply depends on how well the player did. The sound effects are relatively simple, with a single generic explosion sound used for all fire/hit sounds in the game, but with pitch alteration to make it sound like several different samples.

"Feral Weapon" was my first full game. I wrote down the original concept for it before I had the capabilities to make it myself. It was inspired by an episode of Extra Credits discussing Narrative Mechanics and Missile Command, and inspired me to learn how to build it myself, as I wanted to make a game that similarly tells a story through its mechanics. Things went well and I was on my way to build my own full game for Android devices. I would work on the game for hours every day, from the moment I got back from my day job to around 2 AM at night, releasing nightly builds to a tiny pool of testers. My progress halted shortly after I entered the game development program at Shenkar college, but one day the Feral Weapon shall return.