Building the brutal (and brilliant) bullet hell systems of Luna Abyss

gamedeveloper.com:

Luna Abyss feels like a rhythm game disguised as a bullet hell shooter. Bonsai Collective's atmospheric adventure plunges players into the depths of a brutalist prison hidden below the surface of a "mimic moon" known as Luna to recover forgotten technology and learn more about the lost colony that previously inhabited the centuries-old construct.

Once players have slipped beneath the surface of the crimson megastructure, Luna Abyss goes full tilt, peppering them with cosmic horrors, eldritch monstrosities, and bullets. So. Many. Bullets. It's during those frenetic moments that Luna Abyss comes into its own, demanding players combine a myriad of weapons, abilities, and platforming skills to become an unstoppable kinetic force every bit as demonic as their foes.

Building those electric skirmishes, however, required plenty of iteration. Speaking to Game Developer earlier this year, Bonsai Collective co-founder Benni Hill and programmer Matthew Reynolds explained that constructing a bullet hell system that could push players was an "incredibly complex" challenge that required the remote studio to get crafty.

For instance, when the team first stated prototyping, Luna Abyss felt more like a standard first-person shooter than a bullet-drenched slalom, largely because players weren't being confronted by complex bullet patterns that could only be countered with a more dynamic approach.

"When we originally built the system for our early concept demo, we were using a dynamic spawn system. So, the bullets were spawning dynamically from the enemy and being sent out in a pattern of our choosing. That was very rudimentary, and basically involved us saying 'we want to spawn X amount of bullets and then send them off in different