Dandy: Or a Brief Glimpse Into the Life of the Candy Alchemist was released in 2015 by Wefiends. Inc. Deceptively whimsical, Dandy is a perma-death side-scrolling shoot 'em up with a host of stacking power-ups. Different on every play-through, with reactive enemies that force you to strategize.
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Wefiends Inc.
Kevin Barrios — Lead Designer, Game Artist
Nick Barrios — Lead Developer
Steph Fung — Composer/ Additional Art Assistance
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Creative Tools
Adobe Suite (Photoshop, Animate)
Development Tools
Cocos2D-X
Project Management
Jira/ Bitbucket
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Local co-op - Bring up to 3 friends along with randomly created companions. Just hook up your controllers and press start.
Online Racing - Join up to 3 other players in a race to the boss, with kart racing style sabotages (works cross platform).
Thousands of power-up combinations, with powerful synergies to discover. Each power-up combination gives Dandy a completely new look.
Procedurally generated maps make each playthrough different and challenging.
Reactive enemies force you to learn and strategize. Coming in with guns (er, wands) blazing will often be a bad choice.
Choose a custom random seed you can share with friends.
10 song original soundtrack (it's awesome!).
Watch a Let’s Play
Screenshots
Game Overview
The last in a dwindling line, Dandy was the only active candy alchemist of his time. His obsessive search for alchemical ingredients took him into the ruins of the ancient world. It is said that whatever he found there drove him mad, but nothing is truly known about his disappearance. Take a brief glimpse into his life, and uncover the mysteries of a forbidden land.
Early pre-production documentation.
Controls
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Movement
Move Up
Move Down
Projectile
Shoot
Movement Controls for Mobile Devices
In this game, the player controls the main character, Dandy, by swiping to move him across the side of the screen and tapping to shoot. The control scheme was designed to be simple and intuitive, allowing players to focus on the game's core mechanics. The game offers the ability to adjust the swiping sensitivity, allowing players to customize the controls to their preferences. This feature allows players to move Dandy by using small swipes at the bottom-left corner of the screen rather than having to swipe all the way up and down, preventing their fingers from blocking the character.
In addition, the sensitivity can be increased on smaller screens, such as the iPhone 6, to improve the control experience. This ensures that the control scheme remains responsive and comfortable for players, regardless of the device they are using.
Movement Controls for PC
The PC version allows the player to choose between either keyboard, gamepad, or mouse controls. The movement controls were designed to match the 1:1 feel of the mobile version as closely as possible, though there were certain allowances left in order to keep the keyboard controls accessible.
Projectiles
In typical shoot-em-up fashion, the player can shoot projectiles forward in horizontal space. Players shoot by clicking or tapping depending on the platform. Our objective was to create a game that requires strategic thinking from the player and promotes engagement through difficulty and challenge. To achieve this, the player's bullets decrease in size and power as they fire more shots in succession. This mechanic is implemented through a bullet size and power scaling algorithm that reduces both attributes based on the number of shots fired by the player. This serves a dual purpose of visually explaining the mechanic and promoting thoughtful behavior. After a very short refractory period, bullets return to their base size and power. This design choice adds an extra layer of strategy and challenge to the game, keeping players engaged and preventing them from simply blasting their way through the game.
Fixed X-Axis
One quirky design choice was locking the player to the left-hand side of the screen and allowing only for up and down motion. This was done in part to facilitate mobile controls, but more importantly, to reduce the complexity of the required inputs.
Enemy Design
Enemies in Dandy were designed explicitly to match player control input and each enemy acts as a little state machine that takes feedback directly from player input. This isn’t exactly revolutionary, but it’s a core component of the enemy design in Dandy, and everything revolves around this concept.
The enemies in the game have distinct behaviors that make them more than just simple targets. Some enemies attack only when provoked, while others home in on the player like darts, forcing the player to shift up and down the screen to avoid them. Some enemies jump in and out of the screen, shooting at the player at their latest y-position, while others have shields that bounce the player's projectiles back at them.
To achieve this level of variety in enemy behavior, we used a simple AI algorithm that takes into account various factors such as the player's position and the player’s input. These simple behaviors are tied directly to player input which ensures that the enemies pose a challenge while also remaining fair and balanced.
Procedural Encounters
While most shoot-em-ups are set to auto-scroll as enemies make their way on screen, I designed Dandy to skirt this genre convention. The side-scrolling comes to a halt whenever a new set of enemies scrolls on screen, and only continues when all the enemies have either been defeated or have moved off-screen. Each “set” was designed manually, and the game selects each encounter from a “superset” of encounter scenarios. The encounters are not entirely randomized. Each enemy is introduced in a particular order, but their grouping and arrangement make for varied gameplay on each playthrough. For example, an enemy that might have been trivial in one playthrough may present more of a challenge simply based on their position in relation to another enemy.
Power-Ups
Power-ups in Dandy are designed as a holistic elaboration of the game’s basic mechanics as well as a way of implementing certain expected genre conventions. The power-ups have various effects, such as making the player smaller and more maneuverable, allowing bullets to return like boomerangs, or increasing the strength and on-screen duration of projectiles. Each power also changes Dandy’s appearance, leading to unexpected combinations.
These power-ups can be combined to create unique and unexpected combinations, allowing players to experiment and discover new ways to play the game. They are obtained from candy dispenser statues, which offer players a risk/reward choice between refilling their health or obtaining a power-up.
2D Avatar Customization System
In order to convey the power-up combination system visually to the player, I designed a system for overlapping sprite-sheet files into a seamless composite. I did this using Animate CC’s graphic clip system. Each custom asset was exported as its own sprite-sheet, but within a universal domain that locked the pieces into their appropriate position throughout the set of animations. Animate CC then allowed me to dynamically swap assets within its “graphics” containers in order to export them uniformly.
Early pre-production documentation.
Progression Systems
Single Screen Level
One of the most unconventional design choices in Dandy is the fact that the entire game takes place on a single screen or “level”. The game was designed to be completed in 20-30 minutes by an experienced player.
Permadeath
Permadeath is a common mechanic that I felt set the tone for a slower-paced shoot-em-up. It adds a level of risk and consequence to the player's actions. By having the player start from the beginning every time they die, it encourages them to learn from their mistakes and approach the game with a more strategic mindset. It also sets the foundation for all the randomized elements in the game.
In Dandy specifically, permadeath also reinforces the game's "one shot, one kill" gameplay mechanics. Permadeath ensures that the player can't simply brute force their way through the game by taking risks and firing recklessly, but instead encourages them to focus on precision and efficiency. The side-scrolling nature of shoot-em-ups allowed us to convey the player’s failed state in an evocative way by scrolling the screen all the way back to the beginning. We found in playtesting that the player’s first death surprised the player and prepared them for other mechanics that are unconventional in the side-scrolling shoot-em-up genre.
The Alchemist's Compendium
As of update 1.5, The Alchemist’s Compendium is a system that allows players to unlock new Candy ingredients and discover the mysteries of the game's world. It adds an additional layer of depth to the game.
Functionality:
Players can access The Alchemist’s Compendium through the main menu.
The compendium consists of various research goals, each requiring the player to defeat enemies a certain number of times before revealing additional information about the game, as well as narrative elements that had only been implied before the update.
Upon completion of a research goal, the player is rewarded with a new Candy ingredient and/or helpful hints about the game.
There are a total of 9 new power-ups to unlock, which are added to the pool of existing power-ups.
Benefits:
Adds an additional layer of depth and replayability to the game.
Rewards the player with new Candy ingredients and helpful hints, providing a sense of accomplishment and progression.
Offers a new challenge for players to complete and unlock all 9 new power-ups.
World Tendency
As of update 1.5, the game will now adjust its difficulty based on the player's performance, by introducing new evolved enemies to the game. As the player performs better, more evolved enemies will be introduced to keep the gameplay challenging and exciting. Similarly, the game will scale back in difficulty if the player is struggling. This was implemented mostly as an accessibility feature with the added benefit of additional progression elements.
Functionality:
Evolved enemies will have enhanced abilities, making them more challenging to defeat than their regular counterparts.
More opportunities for health regain for struggling players.
The game tracks the player's performance and adjusts the frequency and strength of evolved enemies accordingly.
The number and type of evolved enemies increase as the player progress through the game and improve their skill level.
The feature is active by default, but players are able to turn it off in the game settings if they prefer a consistent difficulty level.
Benefits:
The dynamic difficulty adjustment feature will keep the gameplay challenging and exciting for players of all skill levels.
The introduction of evolved enemies will add variety to the gameplay and provide new challenges for players to overcome.
Players who are more skilled will be rewarded with a more challenging experience, keeping them engaged and motivated to improve their skills.
The feature provides an extra layer of replayability, as players can continue to challenge themselves with increasingly difficult gameplay.
Multiplayer
Co-op
The cooperative mode in Dandy was initially a low-priority feature that ended up being easy to implement and now serves as a key feature of the game. In order to keep balancing to a minimum, the co-op player is limited in their abilities (they don’t receive powers from power-ups, and don’t trigger the enemy’s passive listening abilities).
Randomized Avatars
Using the 2D Customization system I designed for the main character assets, we created the co-op avatar similarly using randomized parts (hat, head, hair, eyes, mouth, body, wand). Additionally, I took advantage of Cocos-2D’s shaders by creating the assets in black and white and coloring them at random (within certain aesthetic parameters) at spawn. The number of combinations is rather large, and we allow the player to re-roll their avatar at any point in the game.
Racing
Similarly, racing was even lower priority and was the result of some prototyping near the final stages of development.
Steam Marketplace
Surprisingly, one of the most effective promotional tools we used was Steam’s digital trading card system. Steam's trading card system is a way for players to collect and trade virtual cards featuring artwork and characters from their favorite games. I created a set of illustrations that also doubled as promotional art.
Press
“Playing as Dandy, a cute little alchemist, you traverse a beautifully-drawn 2D world to tackle a variety of enemies, each with its own specific behavior, as you try to get as far as you can before perishing. You’ll discover some very smart design decisions behind Dandy‘s gameplay that make it a challenging but thoroughly-entertaining shoot ’em up that rewards patience, strategizing, and skill without sacrificing speed. ”
“Dandy: Or a Brief Glimpse Into the Life of the Candy Alchemist hides a very challenging shoot’em up experience under its vibrant visuals, and provided you’re willing to brave its perma-death and procedural mechanics, you’re in for a compelling experience, especially if you have friends to play with or against.”
Video Reviews
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