Alejandro Garcia - Portfolio - Bandit Blaster

Bandit Blaster's title screen, based on the poster for A Fistfull of Dollars

Some of the assets from Bandit Blaster. I particularly like how the train came out

Bandit Blaster is a game made by my younger brother, Diego Garcia, for his game dev class at Campo Verde High School. It was mostly programmed by him in Gamemaker Studio 2, which is the software his class curriculum uses. He has some real talent for programming- his ability to come up with some complicated logic to work around bugs and other issues is truly impressive, he's really fast with it too. I felt inspired by his passion for the idea and offered to help him with the visuals and some ideas (which was allowed, we did check with his teacher). I also have quite a bit of past experience with Gamemaker Studio, so I gave him advice on how to use it here and there.

Now this game was made in under a week and it was for a high school class assignment, so we did borrow and edit visuals from other games for this. Some of the assets are from games like Nuclear Throne, Stardew Valley, and Guardian of Paradise. The cliff walls, some foliage, and the base model for the characters were borrowed like this in order to save time.

Aside from in-game sprites, I also drew him up a couple cutscene images in the same style and mixed sounds for him using Audacity and Freesound.com.

The final game was a top-down shooter with 3 levels, guns the player could pick up and throw, a couple different enemies, some destructible objects, and a boss fight with the bandit leader himself at the end of the game. It ended up being pretty fun. We even snuck in some hidden developer easter eggs, like a giant version of the revolver called the "Big Iron" that you could only obtain by pressing a specific key.

Screenshot from the second level of the game
TOP RIGHT: The objective is to defeat all of the invading bandits in each level. This counter keeps track for you
BOTTOM RIGHT: Here the player can see their current health and the currently equipped weapon

At the end of the game's 3 levels, the player faces off with the bandit leader atop a moving train. The boss has its own health bar and several different unique behaviors that the game randomly switches between to give the fight some variety

The death screen. Players can choose to retry the level or quit to the title screen, should they be sore losers

Cowboy death-glare

Final scene of the game

The player faces off with the bandit leader

The protagonist encounters bandits on the edge of town

A splash screen logo I made for Diego to really put his name on his work and show off to his classmates