"Mantallion - an underwater SHMUP game with dynamic music progression, clean and vibrant art style and challenging yet addicting gameplay."
​
Mantallion was the first somewhat larger team project that I worked on for a course in University.
It's an arcade-ey Shoot 'em Up game where you play as a manta controlling swarms of fish in a deep sea, neon environment.
The visuals were heavily inspired by the "Synthwave" aesthetic that tries to capture nostalgia for the 1980s. The music follows suit here too.
​
In this project I just started to get my toes wet with all the things possible with VFX and shaders so the techniques used are all rather simple, but come together to form a cohesive end result.
ENVIRONMENT
The Environment is very simple but uses a few tricks to make it look a bit neater.
​
One of those is Unity's 2D lighting that only affects the background. Each of the little corals has a light attached to it, making them stand out just a bit more.
Additionally I applied a decent amount of bloom and some chromatic abberation using post processing to sell the neon/synthwave look even more.
The corals also all have a shader applied to them that makes them look like they are swaying in the water current.
​
​
VFX
Tech used: Unity Shader Graph, Shuriken
​
For VFX there were 2 important goals in this project:
1. Sell the arcade-ey, synthwave aesthetic more
2. Communicate mechanics to the player.
​
Pretty much all of the VFX are just bright, solid color particles and trails. The trails in particular were quite tricky, as the time-based default trail in Unity worked just fine for the tips of the wings, but not so much the tail of the manta.
After much experimentation and research I landed on a solution that used a Line Renderer with some custom code to create a trail that was based on distance and not time, this always staying the same length.
​
The trails at the tips of the wings of the manta are also used for communicating the cooldown of the dash action to the player.
When the player dashes they get shorter and thinner and then slowly returns back to the original size as the cooldown counts down. With some sparks playing for when it completely finishes.
​
The player's right click ability is also communicated via the "WIFI Symbol" on the manta's back changing color.
​
MAKING THE FISHES WORK
Similarly to communicating the stuff about the player I also wanted to do the same for the enemies.
​
Firstly the fishes use the same custom trail renderer I mentioned previously to make their bodies move like you would expect.
Secondly their trails also communicate something here: their health.
The big fish has 6 trails that disappear as it takes damage.
​
There's also very simple sparks/explosions when the enemies die, that, combined with the sound effects tell the player that they did something good.
MUSIC
For the music I wanted to do something special from the start. It is a really important part of selling the synthwave aesthetic, but also the underwater theme.
​
I also wanted to make the music dynamic in some way. I ended up landing on slowly, as the player's score increases, fading in different elements of the song. You can listen to some of the different stages on the left.
​
I often have an easier time composing music if I sort of try to match the visuals with the movement of the notes.
I went with a rather fast arp that goes up and down quickly, which was supposed to symbolize waves. But of course an arp is also one of the core features of any synthwave song.
​
For the Bass I went with a really low and dark synth to show off the fact that you're in the deep sea and that there are these almost alien fish here that are threatening your environment.
These parts also only trigger a bit later so you get the sense of increasing danger.
​
In contrast to that is the lead, which is supposed to signify that the player does have a chance against these threats. It sounds fairly triumphant, but also is not always there, sort of rewarding the player every now and again for surviving a certain amount of time.
0 SCORE
4000+ SCORE
7000+ SCORE
FULL SONG:
SOUND
The sound effects were a ton of fun to make for this.
First I recorded various water splashing and bubbling sounds using, for example, a syringe filled with water and a cup, as you can see in the video on the left.
I then ran pretty much all of these sounds through a vocoder, giving them that retro, 80s feeling.
​
After that it was just a matter of adding some reverb and chaning the speed of the sounds and I had some pretty decent arcade-ey sounds effects for the player and the enemies!