Hellemoji

Project Overview

Hellemoji is a top-down 2D twin-stick shooter where you play as a potato defending the world from waves of emojis and other meme brainrot. It's a very diffcult game, think robotron but faster pace with projectiles and explosions. It has rougelike elements within the campaign, but full on build crafting for survival and sandbox modes.

The build crafting is very deep, for example,you can make healing builds, spam rocket builds, dash based builds, glass cannon builds, augment how enemies behave, and more. It's truly a lot for a Javascript game, and i'm quite proud of how the systems are put into place. The particle systems and physics calculations are all handled with multithreading with web workers to stop the main thread from dying when calculating several AoE attacks at once.

All of the pixel art assets for the weapons and muzzleflashes were created by me using GIMP and Aseprite. I also curated all the weapon audio myself and designed an entire heavy metalsoundtrack for the game using SUNO. Elevanlabs was used to create an "unreal tournament" style announcer that taunts the player when they die. And special attention was paid to how the audio and sfx were balanced. Audio fades in between scenes and can optionally persist throughout scenes.

The engine itself is designed for 2D shooters roguelike games, wrapped with Electron for desktop. It features multiple game modes including campaign, survival, and sandbox, alongside a deep build-crafting system that lets players radically alter how the game plays. Very easy to add new abilities and weapons. Full controller support and configurable aim assist with reticle friction which is something I don't see often in other games.

The boss encounters are very fun and i really leaned into the emoji memes for the bosses included an anime-girl eggplant, and a circus clown poop emoji. There are currently 6 bosses in the campaign, and two hidden bosses at the end after you beat the campaign which really challenge the player and require tighter movement and aim. The bosses are designed to move around the map on a defined pattern with different phases and attacks. There is also enrage mechanics where the boss will become stronger and faster the more you damage it.

I intentionally used generative AI to produce the boss assets as corny as possible, I then combined images together in GIMP then cleaned up all the AI Slop pixels and threw everything into aesprite where I animated and exported the spritesheets. Had an absolute blast with the workflow here and the laughs from friends/testers never ends.

The project was put on hold because chromium released an out-of-the-blue update that changed all of the classic meme emojis to a new cartoonish style which doesn't suit the game or the emojis anymore. it's really just another L from Google. The game was designed around use of these emojis for high performance in rendering hundreds of enemies at once, but now I need to actually produce the art assets for the original look - which is fine, but i'm not planning on it right now.

Key Features

• Full controller and M&K support
• Configurable aim assist with reticle friction
• Deep build crafting system with over 60 unique abilities to mix and match
• Support for Multiple game modes including campaign, survival, and sandbox
• Installable and playable without an internet connection
• over 50 levels and 8 bosses, hours of replayability
• custom soundtrack and sound effects

Technologies Used

Electron.js, JavaScript, CSS, HTML

Project Links

🚧 Project is currently being developed and is not yet publicly available.