Cū Blight
Cū Blight is a top-down roguelike shooter produced by a 10-person team under DigiPen Institute of Technology from Sep 2022 – Apr 2023, of which I served as the game’s Lead Systems Designer and Creative Director.
- Maintained supporting design documents (GDD, ASF), as well as fundamental game system mechanics and level design & progression via Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Google Suite
- Assisted other team members in ensuring our creative vision was attainable and unified
Cū Blight’s Trailer
Overview
Cū Blight more or less remained consistent with what was pitched, that being a 2.5D top-down shooter roguelike with incredibly low-polygon assets. Having come right off the heels of modding Isaac for the vast majority of the previous summer, I asked to join the team and to serve as its Creative Director, which the team accepted with open arms.
Game Systems & Pacing
We originally did have the projectile-based system of Isaac in mind, but realized very quickly that modifying the player’s shots would take far too much time to develop, and so only developed two shot modifiers and two dash modifiers, with all other upgrades being simple stat-ups, which gave the added benefit of being a lot easier to balance for.
- Designed and balanced player mechanics including player stat & ability progression, as well as base player mechanics such as the dash and Execubtion
- Designed 7 enemy & 3 boss behaviors and created their respective models
- Designed level progression for 3 “stages”
Cū Blight’s Upgrade Menu
Cū Blight Gameplay Screenshot
Inspritations & Innovations
- Iterated on The Binding of Isaac and Enter the Gungeon’s progression & item systems
- Iterated on Doom Eternal and Mighty No. 9 to create an engaging healing system via dashing into dear-dead enemies
- Iterated on Just Shapes and Beats & Nier Automata for in-game visuals & tone, specifically for clear delineation in a monochrome color scheme
- Iterated on Shovel Knight: Specter of Torment’s trailer to create Cu Blight’s trailer
Hats!
I actually wasn’t the person that pitched having unlockable hats; that was our producer. However, I took that idea and ran with it, realizing that we could have our hats reference all of the other games currently in development for that class at DigiPen. Figured that’d be a nice little thing to honor the other games everyone else were passionately making. Aside from those, we also had a running gag of an “Everything Hat” during development that I decided to make the reward for defeating the final boss, the Tesseract.
Cū Blight’s Hats Menu
Game Design Document
The GDD outlines all of the team’s major decisions, covering a high-level overview, intended audience, design pillars, and intended experience track, which I kept updated throughout development. Halfway through the project, all of the team members looked back at the doc and reflected on what we have currently, what we plan to do, and what we want to do in the game. We then updated the doc accordingly, and I kept it updated from there.
ASF Spreadsheet
Good old ASF Spreadsheet. Nothin’ beats that!
- Covers all affordances, signifiers, and feedback for all major game mechanics, with categories covering visuals, audio, and other
- Updated ASF list with task prioritization and completion, letting it act as a high-level checklist
Main Menu Figma Remake
A few years later (in early 2025), I remade Cū Blight’s main menu partially for fun, partially as a demo of what I can do in Figma. Still not 100% happy with the new UI, since I made it in like a week, but it’s still miles better than the old one!