Game Feel Demo — CGBoost
A bullet-hell shoot-em-up demo built entirely around game feel: responsive controls, hit feedback, and juice, made as a test project for CGBoost.
Context
CGBoost brought me on for a test project to see what I could build and teach. I made a bullet-hell shoot-em-up demo built entirely around game feel, plus a video tutorial walking through it. They ended up going with someone else who had more teaching experience, but the project turned into one of my favorite feel studies.
It draws from two references: Andre Cardoso’s game feel breakdown post (https://x.com/andre_mc/status/2069084211944849750), and the opening flight sequence from NieR: Automata, where 2B pilots a flight unit through a bullet-hell shoot-em-up. I built my own version of that idea rather than copying either directly.
My Work
Teaching Intro
- Created a short segment tutorial video specifically to teach BP fundamentals, covering the “teach” half of the brief.
Core Movement & Combat
- Built a jet player that snaps between 9 fixed screen positions, tuned to move smoothly but quickly so dodging enemy bullets feels fast and precise.
- Built a lock-on system: locked shots home toward the target enemy, unlocked shots fire straight down that axis.
- Built a 3-life system.
- Built jet enemies with an animated health bar that drains as they take damage, plus randomized names per enemy.
Feel & Feedback
- Screen shake, a red screen tint, and chromatic aberration on player hit.
- Time dilation when the player gets hit, which slows further and fades to the main menu on death.
- Enemy hit reactions: a WPO-driven knockback that settles back to position, and a white flash through a material instance to sell the hit.
- Small spark VFX on impact, plus a drifting explosion and wind particle effect that trails behind the player’s movement direction to sell speed.
- The plane tilts opposite its movement direction when strafing, with the camera rotating slightly too, both to sell speed and keep it feeling dynamic.
- An animated, incrementing kill counter, and a player health bar that turns red on the last hit as a death warning.
- On-screen control prompts in the top left that light up per input as you press arrow keys, shoot, or lock-on.
Intro Sequence
- Built a NieR-inspired intro: the camera starts facing down above the jet, then smoothly rotates around to sit behind it as the player’s health bar fills up.
A Small Joke
- On death, the player “re-deploys” from the main menu, and the game’s hotfix patch number increments to track how many times you’ve died.
Conclusion
CGBoost went with someone with more teaching experience, but the project did what it needed to: prove that a pile of small, layered feedback effects, screen shake, hit-stop, knockback, tilt, adds up to something that feels genuinely fun and responsive. I’d like to revisit it someday and turn it into the full tutorial series I couldn’t make happen with CGBoost.