I am the creator of Monster Interceptor. A game on which you control a pulsar gun, with the objective of reaching and stopping an alien invasion.

Development process

This time I wanted to reach a larger audience and tried to develop using Lōve instead of game maker. But as the time passed I decided to get back to game maker and reach my objective: Finish the game. Next are the steps I did:

1. Get the theme – You only get one

2. Brainstorming for ideas

3. Sketch basic functionality of selected idea

4. Install lōve and run some tests.

5. Implement the pulsar ray. (took a long time… 4-5 hours)

6. Rant about my slow progress using lua.

7. Switch to game maker!

8. Implement again the pulsar ray (Just 30 minutes in game maker)

9. Tweak the pulsar ray for smoothness.

10. Add space exploration room

11. Add menus

12. Add pulsar ray eye candy (paint the trajectory of the “bullet”)

13. Time to add sound effects! (And failed… skip sound effects!)

14. Time to add music! success!

15. Submit

What went right

– I had previously joined LD48 and knew about the time constrains and knew the submit process so there were no surprises there.

– This time I tried to do a very simple idea and incrementally polish until the time was up.

– Experience as a software developer allowed me to make better decisions. (Inheritance, design patterns, etc…)

What went wrong

– Starting with lōve and lua with no experience on them. Definitely a really bad decision.

– Weird bug on sound effects.

The result

Here is my game, I hope you enjoy playing it as much much as I did developing!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview&uid=11246