Post-mortem

This all started with me getting into manga sometime around the beginning of the year with Berserk and just kept reading more and more.

At some point I read Chainsawman, and I just instantly loved it. The story, art, characters, I just loved it all. Still do with part 2 of the manga happening right now. At the time of writing this, the anime has also dropped and is imo, fricken spectacular.

Loved it all so much that I just had to do a fan creation. And since the only artistic thing I can sorta do is make games, it was a no-brainer to make a fangame lol

(   NOTE, THERE MAY BE MINOR CHAINSAWMAN SPOILERS IN THIS PORT-MORTEM, MOSTLY CUS THE GAME COVERS A FIGHT FROM THE FIRST EPISODE / CHAPTER   )





How the power of the main character in Chainsawman ( Denji ) works was pretty simple to translate into game mechanics tbh. The guy has one of the most badass forms of any character ever in all honestly and looks fricken metal ( The entire manga is fricken metal in all honesty ). He's sorta on a timer on how long he can maintain that form since he loses blood while in it. So the type of game I'd make was simple

a beat-em-up where you're on a timer.

And to replenish that timer, the player should be able to do executions on weakened enemies. Of course, to ensure that it doesn't feel too repetetive, I had  to draw quite a few executions and also give enemies more than a few death animations. All of which had to look very bloody of course. Something like the old god of war games, and maybe that old wolverine game based on the movie from 2009.

Most superhero games or beat-em-ups have a special meter that the player fills up and uses to unleash a special attack or two, so I thought I'd try the same. In this case, I could also integrate it into the mechanics and have the special replenish your health as well. I could also use it to incentivize players to actually throw enemies into each other and fill the bar faster.

What definitely took the the longest time in this whole game, apart from the art and animations, was definitely the enemy AI. I haven't done proper enemy crowd AI for a beat-em-up before, but got something working in the end lol. It works on the principle of a token system, something kinda like DOOM's token system.

And then of course, a boss because the fight this game is based around had a fantastic fight in the very beginning of the story. Drawing the boss was a pain because I think this is the first time I've tried drawing something larger than 32x32, still though, came out decently if I say so myself. The actual fight itself was fun to make, I even got to pull the camera back and make things seem more epic as well lol. I took some inspiration from the older god of war games for this fight, most notable the hydra fight from the first game

Now then music ...... Yeah ...... I can't do that lol.

So I contacted Paul Owen who made an absolutely banger fan cover of the music that plays during the fight in the anime and used that track ( I still listen to it daily lol. Incredible track ). Also got the other sound effects from pixabay.

And hey presto, the game's done lol. The actual combat system is something I think I could probably do more with in another game maybe. As for this fangame, there are some absolutely spectacular fights later in the series that I'd love to create in this game, but we'll have to see ig. I'm definitely happy with what I've made so far though.

This game is my love letter to Chainsawman as a whole and to Tatsuki Fujimoto. Thank you sensei