We started with a rough template and idea of what kind of game we wanted to make: shooting in different directions and changing colors being the base. Due to the rhythm-like nature of the game’s vision we spent a lot of our early timing figuring out which elements we could inject rhythm into and how that would affect gameplay feel. Spawning enemies on beat became a constant task to improve. We also focused on which mechanics would suit the format and make use of the medium of IOS.

From there we did some playtesting and found that more mechanics and enemy types were needed. This came in the form of shielding and variance along enemy speed and health states. We used these added features to inject some randomness into the enemy spawns to make the game feel relatively unique. Upon playtesting we spent a lot of time mapping the game to properly introduce the use of said mechanics and scale overall difficulty. This was particularly challenging due to the number of elements we had to balance in conjunction with the song length. 

Further playtesting let to balance changes and identification of errors on user movement given some states, balancing audio, and perfecting UI that displays player and enemy health as well as shield cooldowns. Additionally we added a series of much stronger boss-like enemies towards the later levels to make the game’s difficulty scaling more cohesive.