Idle shooter still need some votes.

Try it here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/idle-shooter

ok so it's maybe time to write a small post mortem on my submission.

Design

The idea was to do a small top down shooter and mix it with a Idle game mechanic where you upgrade things to a ridiculous extent. This is a solid and safe base and I think it was too safe. The idle game mechanic is nice but working mainly for the money you get. If the balancing was too weak at the beginning the game was immediately less fun and if it was getting crazy with tons of bullet on screen it became confusing so I ended up with only few possible upgrade and gold being the main one that goes in crazy town.

At the beginning of the project I had much more enemy on screen which was quite fun too unreadable and hard when the game found its art style.

Art

Art is definitively not my thing and I think this is something work on for the next LD especially by trying to find a more simplistic art style. Overall I'm still happy with some elements (especially the cactus) but the main character is definitively a bit underwhelming. Just look at him:

For the animation I again avoided to have keyframe animations. A thing I should really try out also for the next LD. I try to make animations mainly using easing functions which work I think quite well for many things. Except of course for the main character that was unfortunately too static.

Code

I am using WakaTime to track my time which is always kind of interesting. For this Ludum Dare I work around 18 hours on my code which is much more than my previous project. This is bizarre to me since I feel the code was more straightforward and simple. The summary showed that I worked a lot on the upgrade and I think it might be because a lot of the balancing was done there.

One of the bad idea was to start the jam by creating a new system to handle entities. This is usually a bad idea to implement tools for a jam but while I lost some time it inspired me to create a new system in the next few days. The idea is registering entities with a list of class or descriptors. But the core idea is to have a simple but flexible query system similar to jQuery. So it would easy for example to get all entities in a zone of the game world that are one fire and not the player ("zone-2-3 on_fire -player"). It was really helpful on this project to get easily all the bullets that are flying without maintaining different arrays like I was doing in the past.

Anyways, thanks for reading and send your games in the comments if you want me to play them.

@NicMagnier