In our game Bloody Hell 2, you pulverize demons as a small Angel wielding a giant demonic hammer. Explore Hell's deepest layers, and uncover the truth of how Heaven fell in this Bullet-Hell Metroidvania.

Over 400K players, and a 3.2K+ Overwhelmingly Positive rating on Steam on our previous game Bloody Hell. made in only 6 months.
My studio Pun Intended (aged just 2.5 years) consists of me and my two cofounders.
Responsibilities: story, most of the art, and game design, marketing, QA/general testing.
- Worked closely with a composer/sound designer to provide feedback and make sure the music fits the story. Managing a community Discord with over 3K members, including handling player reports.
Started working on Bloody Hell 2 in 2024, currently over 37,5K wishlists on Steam.

Heaven

The first few weeks were mostly spent learning to do the textures/spritework for 3D environment. My workflow eventually became making a blockout in-engine and drawing the concept art over it. Drawing my final assets in aseprite was really efficient, so I wrote a short script in Unity to export screenshots as .ase files with correct resizing.

The first few iterations of Heaven's story were that it fell in a pool of blood, which eventually was scrapped. In these screenshots I tried laying out a path that the player could walk, not yet having figured out how to use verticality completely in my favor yet.

Sketching out interesting paths for the player to walk and testing out blending methods for isometrically projected textures.

After having tried out the blue color scheme, I decided to use more gray and gold. This worked better because our Heaven was more white and thus stereotypical in our previous game. Showing the grayer tones along with the crumbling, floaty architecture of Heaven more cleary communicated its decay.

Player

Azrael is a white pigeon and an angel, the sign of peace. He believes that he will bring peace to Hell by demolishing demons.

Initially I wanted the player to be smaller compared to BH1 (Bloody Hell "1"). Because of the 3D environment, you want the player's collider to be mostly round too to clearly see when a bullet goes BEHIND the player. In addition to this, I wanted the player to look more 'fragile', hence why I tried to make it look more like an actual bird and tried a few more whacky designs.

In the end we wanted players to feel slightly more "heroic", and less whacky since the game's story became more serious. Despite being 'heroic', the player ended up looking fragile because of the bosses size, as well as the camera zooming out.

Since early on, one of the design pillars of the game contained that the player character
should feel fragile and small compared to their environment.

Despite the ortographic camera,
we were able to fake depth by using an additional perspective camera for the background.

Also, zooming occasionally to show how small the player is compared to big entities was also effective.

Limbo

One of my first challenges with creating Limbo would be the amount of brightly colored Lava, that simply had to look dangerous yet wouldn't constantly hurt your eyes with its intensity. Using some color studies I noticed how Hades darkens colors in the corner of the view, especially darker colors.

The colors still had to work with the bullets, since we found out combat scenarious with lava pools to jump over is fun.

Using some darkened models I was able to create some depth in cave-areas

This Cathedral was built by some very old demons. Hidden inside the cathedral is the tomb of the architect. After you've visited their tomb, you take an elevator all the way from the cellar to the very top to battle a boss.

Without being allowed to spoil much of the story, this is a brief description of the NPCs shown.

The above NPCs are the Heaveners, the bird-angels that were lucky enough to fall inside of Heaven while all of it came down. The unlucky souls who fell outside became the Cult of The Crooked Halo, dressed in red an purple below.

Greed

Unlike other areas in Hell, Greed is a very mechanical area, filled with greedy moles that want to mine out Hell for their own benefit.

Gluttony

Gluttony takes place inside the corpse of a long dead god. I wanted the player to really feel disgusted while inside of the body, but also seeing that there is a lot of beauty hidden in these depths. The contrast between this slight body horror and floral beauty is my favourite part of the area, along with some of the enemy concepts that I created.

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