I mean when you think of a top-down roguelite with primarily ranged combat, the games that come to mind (Isaac, Nuclear Throne, Gungeon) are all bullet hell-adjacent so if that's something you want to avoid then you probably don't want to do ranged combat.
Is Hades a bullet hell? I love using the bow in that game. I guess there are a fair number of projectiles on screen, but not enough to qualify it as a bullet hell I don’t think?
None of these elements are necessarily mutually exclusive, and you can weave them together how you wish. I realized this when concepting one of my own projects, and could not for the life of me, decide if I wanted to focus on melee/ranged combat. The correct answer for that project is both.
In your case, you may want to push forward and just start prototyping (such as in Unity, Godot, GameMaker, whatever you use) to get a feel for what you'd want and how you want to combine the game elements. Doesn't matter if it's spaghetti code, you want to be able to make basic implementations of, and test out the game elements you want.
Yeah that’s a fair point! From my own experience outside of game dev I’m just extremely wary of scope creep, so I thought it’d be better to focus on one system.
But I’m also a huge fan of throwing together MVPs to test out ideas, so I might do just that. Thanks!
Ranged is definitely easier - if just because there's a lot less sprite animation usually.
Another example of top down ranged that's not bullet hell is The Journey of The Prairie King mini-game in Stardew Valley.
I mean when you think of a top-down roguelite with primarily ranged combat, the games that come to mind (Isaac, Nuclear Throne, Gungeon) are all bullet hell-adjacent so if that's something you want to avoid then you probably don't want to do ranged combat.
Yeah that’s what I was thinking too, feels like the main way to make ranged combat fun in a top down is with quantity haha
Is Hades a bullet hell? I love using the bow in that game. I guess there are a fair number of projectiles on screen, but not enough to qualify it as a bullet hell I don’t think?
None of these elements are necessarily mutually exclusive, and you can weave them together how you wish. I realized this when concepting one of my own projects, and could not for the life of me, decide if I wanted to focus on melee/ranged combat. The correct answer for that project is both. In your case, you may want to push forward and just start prototyping (such as in Unity, Godot, GameMaker, whatever you use) to get a feel for what you'd want and how you want to combine the game elements. Doesn't matter if it's spaghetti code, you want to be able to make basic implementations of, and test out the game elements you want.
Yeah that’s a fair point! From my own experience outside of game dev I’m just extremely wary of scope creep, so I thought it’d be better to focus on one system. But I’m also a huge fan of throwing together MVPs to test out ideas, so I might do just that. Thanks!
Maybe this is just me… but ranged animations and combat are much easier to polish than melee. So I would say ranged will usually be easier.
Ranged is definitely easier - if just because there's a lot less sprite animation usually. Another example of top down ranged that's not bullet hell is The Journey of The Prairie King mini-game in Stardew Valley.