Rescue Matters

An arcade top-down shooter about tactical revives and multi-agent chaos.

Genre: Action / Arcade Shooter
Role: Solo Developer
Engine: Unity (C#)
Team Size: 1
Duration: 7 Days
Platform: Web / PC
Play: https://yousayrandy.itch.io/rescue-matters

Development Overview

Rescue Matters was created solo in 7 days for Game Parade Spring 2022 under the theme “Every Life Counts.” The game reimagines traditional arcade lives as both a resource and a mechanic: when a player dies, they can be revived by future lives and rejoin the fight, creating multi-agent control chaos and emergent combat puzzles.

The project was a design and programming challenge built around input-sharing, risk-reward systems, and strategic unit placement—delivering bullet-hell intensity with simultaneous character control.

Core Programming & Design Contributions

🧠 Multi-Agent Revival System
Implemented a system where each “life” becomes a new unit controlled in parallel.

  • Revived characters inherit player input, requiring strategic placement to avoid friendly fire.

  • Built revive logic with delay timers and activation zones, gating player power behind positioning and timing.

  • Designed shared input routing for movement and aiming while maintaining independent state tracking.

⚙️ Combat & AI Architecture

  • Developed fast melee and slow ranged enemies with distinct behavior trees and targeting logic.

  • Implemented AI focus switching based on active player health, dynamically adjusting as units are lost or revived.

  • Created spawn manager using flexible prefab arrays, tied to a global difficulty parameter for adaptive pacing.

📈 Difficulty Scaling System
Coded an extensible difficulty system that adjusts enemy spawn rates based on time remaining.

  • Created an adjustable scalar tied to a percentage of the mission timer.

  • Designed for reusability—could plug into drop rates, enemy health, or behavior in future builds.

🖥️ UI / Game Loop Implementation

  • Built complete arcade loop: intro screen, gameplay HUD, victory/defeat conditions, retry system.

  • Designed singleton managers for tracking lives, revive stock, and mission state.

  • Implemented contextual menus that double as instruction and retry prompts to maximize development speed.

🎯 Design-for-Learning Focus

  • Frontloaded revive mechanic from the very first encounter to center it as the game’s core idea.

  • Balanced enemy difficulty to encourage reviving over raw shooting skill.

  • Removed friendly fire after testing revealed it overwhelmed early players, later reconsidered for tuning.

Challenges Tackled

✦ Simultaneous Player Control
Input sharing across multiple revived units introduced unique challenges:

  • Avoided unintended behavior via precise input filtering and state separation.

  • Built revive queue tracking to dynamically reassign control post-death.

✦ Jam Scope Creep & Debug Pressure
Developing under a 7-day limit meant rapid bug squashing and frequent balance iteration.

  • Created systemic architecture to allow rapid tuning (e.g., spawn intervals, HP values).

  • Refactored revive, destruction, and enemy code mid-jam to account for prefab hierarchy issues.

Outcome

Rescue Matters may be visually minimal, but it showcases layered systems thinking, modular difficulty scaling, and real-time decision-making through mechanics. The project pushed my limits as a solo developer and taught me the value of flexibility, responsiveness to player behavior, and shipping under constraint.

It’s a messy, bullet-filled, slightly buggy thing—but it works, and it taught me a ton.

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