In recent years, Steam has been invaded by the bullet hell genre. Now more than ever, these 2d shoot em up style titles are making waves on the PC platform. Some of them are roguelike and give you a basic story. Some, however, have fleshed out narratives. One such game is Road Doom, an ‘arcade bullet-hell with a cheesy story’. I spoke with Andre (who goes under the alias Agelvik) about his game and the future of it.

1. Welcome! First of all,  how did you create the assets for Road Doom?

Well for art I used Photoshop. The process of making them was very experimental, I kind of just went with what I thought was cool. I didn’t make all of it tho! Tobias Antonsen is responsible for drawing most of the enemies and stage backgrounds, and Kristoffer Sundet made the art for the enemies in the Magma stages.

For the spritesheet, I used a program called Texturepacker which allowed me to automatically add new sprites to a spritesheet, and with a click of a button update all the art inside Unity with names and everything! Super time saver.

For music I used Mixcraft 7, and made the tracks for “mainmenu”, “prologue”, “rival fight”, “mothership” and “four horsemen”. Rest is by Kevin Macleod (world stage tracks) and Art of Escapism (void king fight)

Sound effects I used bits and pieces from freesound.org, some samples inside Mixcraft 7 and a sound generator called Bfxr which created these neat retro sounds! I also used my own voice from time to time. In the end I mix the sounds inside a program called “Audacity” to spice them up.

I coded with a plugin called Playmaker. I hecking hate writing scripts and deal with a wall of text, and having this plugin allowed me to visually code the game by connecting different “States” with eachother. This tool was a true life saver for me. Sure, you don’t learn much about programming, but eh who cares, if it works I’m happy, I just want to make games lol. If it wasn’t for this tool this game would never happen.

2. How does progression work?

After completing a stage, player have the option to upgrade himself with a total number of 9 skills. To activate these, you need to collect enough “Crystal Orbs” which are these blue looking orb things. They drop from certain enemies, lots from bosses.
Player is able to unlock all the skills in one play-through, even first timers! (unless they suck hihi)

3. What did you draw inspiration from when making Road Doom?

Inspiration.. hmm.. Don’t think we used any reference or anything lol. We just came up with ideas and went “haha car protagonist guy fighting weird creatures in desert, void, magma to save world and rival’s princess, yes epic”. Since we went for this randomness, it gave us tons of freedom to do whatever we wanted.
Btw I say “we” because there were initially 4 of us, but then I took over after we launched it on Google Play 2 years ago. I was never happy with the results of the game and went solo afterwards. During this stage, Lars Kristian Zamori which is the 4th member of the team kept me motivated all the way through. If it wasn’t for him I’d probably stop bother with the game as there’s been many situations where I’ve lost interests and motivation to keep on. During development there’s been countless times where I’ve said out loud “I hate this hecking stupid hecking game get the heck out of here stupid garbage HECK CRAP HNNG” with lots of swearing involved, but that’s frustration for ya lol.

4. Will there be DLC/updates to the game?

Nah, no DLC. There will probably be updates from time to time tho with minor fixes and implementations, but nothing major.

5. Lastly, do you have any other projects in the works?

Yeah! Me and 4 others are currently trying to get another game on Steam called “Owl Watch”. It’s actually close to done, but we haven’t set a release date yet. We’re aiming to get it out late September/October. Here’s a trailer of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Y4RqRp5VIs

After this one, me and some friends got plans to make another game, open world something idk, we’ll see! In addition I got another solo project I’m thinking of as well which I’m excited about. The future is lookin’ good!

Road Doom is out now on Steam.