This was my third Ludum Dare entry and I am very happy with what I was able to complete in such a short time. You can see the result in a couple screenshots below or you can check out my game here.

At it’s core, Out of Bullets is a shoot ’em up, but you are limited to firing the ‘trash’ out of the back of your ship, which requires careful avoidance of enemies and bullets in order to line up shots.

What went right:

• Art: I spent more time on graphics for this game than I ever did on my other games and I think it shows in the final game. I probably spent too much time on certain parts of it, such as the stars/planets generation, but I had a lot of fun doing it. I used Google images to reference a few sci-fi ships, but then drew a variation on paper until I got something that looked easy enough to create and started creating everything in Gimp.
• Animation: I had a lot of fun last time creating animation, but I really took the time to make the animation I had this time work well with the game. Ship engines, explosions, and the menu doors. The past experience using Gimp really helped out here and I only had to tweak a couple animations once they were in the game to make them look more natural.
• Sound: This was actually a last minute thought put into the game, but thanks to using jfxr before, I was able to quickly turn out the few needed sounds to add to the game.
• Gameplay / Difficulty: I actually threw together the difficulty pretty quick and never modified it.  It always just felt good while I was playing it.  It starts out fairly easy and ramps up the difficulty pretty quickly. The multiplier shown next to the score was a last minute addition to show the difficulty in some form, which I feel helps show the users that there is something getting more difficult and gives them a more intermediate goal than just a high score to achieve.

What went wrong:

• Items: The original idea I had was to create a few unique ‘weapons’ that each did different things when shot, which would then make you think about what you were shooting and plan attacks more.  I didn’t plan them out as much as I wanted to and due to lack of time, just made them slightly different in how many bullets a couple could take before being destroyed. This made the reloading hatches in the top right of the ui not as useful as I had originally designed them to be.

Things that could be improved/added:

• Music: I still haven’t found a good method for creating music as a non-music person.  I played with a few interesting tools before the competition, but none of them had an easy way to export the created music.
• Leaderboards:  If I had more time, I would have added a global leaderboard to track scores.  I’ve seen this used to great effect in other games, but have not attempted it myself. I might try doing this in a post Ludum Dare version.
• Story/Goal: I had some thoughts for how to add snippets of a story or an end goal to the game, but I don’t think either would have helped the end result much at the time.  It would be interesting to see how much different the game feels with these added in and might play around with it for a future version.
• Social Media/ More Posts: I still haven’t convinced myself to start using social media during these events or to post status updates, but I know that it would result in more people seeing the game early on and could get me more feedback.  This is one of the areas I will likely be focusing the most on in future events.

As always, this was a lot of fun creating a game and challenging myself to get something completed and somewhat polished. I look forward to continuing this game and doing more Ludum Dare events in the future to keep improving.

Feel free to check out my game: Out of Bullets and give me any feedback you have.