Wrestling with The Whales

Wrestling with the Whales is a bullet hell prototype, where the player must fight with a whale, to help them get in shape. The game is based on my experience giving a short presentation about whales when I was in Kindergarten. Because I was 5 years old at the time, I was not that knowledgeable about whales, so my presentation ended up being pretty funny and stupid, and my family always looks back and laughs about it.

One of the main connections to my whale presentation is the theme of exercising / fitness. As part of my presentation, I mentioned how whales get fat in the winter so that they can stay warm. To demonstrate this, I took a huge stack of papers, and cut them out to look like whales. When held in a stack, the papers looked like a really fat whale. Then I let go, and as more and more pieces of paper fell off the stack, the whale got skinnier and skinnier until only one paper was left, and the whale was so skinny that it had become two dimensional. I translated my funny presentation about fat whales into a game, by basing it on a whale who is trying to exercise, to get in shape after the winter is over.

I chose to make my game a bullet hell, because the chaos of bullets flying all over the screen really captured the craziness of my presentation, where I had so many papers full of whale drawings falling all over the floor. I connected the bullet hell idea back to the game’s narrative premise, by saying that wrestling is the only kind of exercise that the whale likes. I decided to name my game “Wrestling with the Whales” because it connected to the theme of fighting, and because it also sounded funny, again fitting tonally with my childhood memory.

My game is unique compared to other bullet hell games because of my emphasis on player movement. In most bullet hell games, the player does not really need to dodge the enemy’s bullets, because the player can still try to shoot the enemy, even if they are getting hit by the enemy’s bullets at the same time. In this game, however, the player temporarily loses the ability to shoot whenever they get hit. This means that the player cannot brute force their way through a field of bullets. Instead, they must dodge incoming bullets if they are to maintain their ability to shoot, to hit their enemies and win the game. Because the game takes place underwater, I made the player slide and slip around, making it a challenge to navigate the field of hazards. This makes dodging more challenging for the player.

I gave the player two abilities to help them as they dodge and move around the screen. First, I created 4 short cuts on the screen, which allow the player to walk off the edge of the map and hop to the other side. These short cuts can help the player escape, if they are surrounded by bullets on all sides. I also gave the player a powerup, which can be unlocked by shooting the whale 10 times in a row without getting hit. When used, the powerup clears all existing bullets from the screen, and makes the whale temporarily run away from you. Like the shortcuts, the powerup is useful when the player is in a tough spot. By clearing all the bullets on screen and making the whale run away, the player is given a great opportunity to better position themselves for the next wave of oncoming bullets.

The dodging, sliding, shortcut, and powerup mechanics were the main experimental aspects of my prototype game. Through experimenting with these mechanics, I tried to take the genre of the bullet hell, and bring it in a new direction by emphasizing dodging, defense, and player movement, instead of greatly focusing on more offensive gameplay.