Powered by LootLocker: HellFight by Paku

Genre: Rogue-lite / souls-like

Platform: Itch.io & Newgrounds

Game Engine: Unity

Today we are launching an ongoing series of blog posts called Powered by LootLocker where we will be featuring a variety of games built using LootLocker. As advocates for all types of games made by all sorts of people we want to use this series as an opportunity to highlight the variety of games and game developers using LootLocker, while hopefully increasing their exposure to the world.

LootLocker is a game backend service designed for even the smallest of teams, and this couldn’t be more true than Paku who developed HellFight using LootLocker.

Paku, whose real name is Mary Phun, is a solo developer from Japan. She is 22 years old and grew up in Malaysia where she spent a lot of her childhood learning about game development by building mods for Warcraft III and working with RPG Maker. After high school Mary decided to pursue her passion for game development by studying Game Programming at college. Driven by the satisfaction of seeing the results of her hard work in the hands of players for the first time, Mary continues to develop new games whenever she can. She loves the challenge game development presents despite sometimes losing motivation when working outside of her comfort zone and not having the documentation or learning materials available to help guide her.

With her latest game HellFight, Mary set herself a challenge to revisit a game she made a long time ago that she had originally written in C with just a basic renderer, and rebuild it in Unity as a way to see how much she has learnt about game development since then. With influences from her favorite games like Hades, Dark Souls, and Risk of Rain, Mary wanted to make sure that HellFight is replayable, giving the player a different experience every time they play. The resulting game took just under two weeks to complete by herself and she is most proud of the responsive and tight controls and the enemies who each have a unique attack pattern that the player needs to figure out in order to defeat them.

To begin, Mary started by integrating LootLocker’s leaderboard system as that was a feature she knew she wanted for her game to encourage replayability. As HellFight was being released on Itch.io she wanted an easy leaderboard system that could be cross-platform or not require any platform integration at all. Thankfully LootLocker is here to help, and she was up and running with the leaderboards within 30 minutes. Mary chose LootLocker because it had such a simple and straightforward integration. Based on the positive experience she had working with our backend service, she is considering using LootLocker to add currencies and a progression system to her game in the future. One thing Mary does know for sure is that the next time she starts making a game she will definitely be using LootLocker!

Keep up the great work, Paku!