If you haven’t played my vertical-shmup-with-nonviolent-options, it’s here.

Origin

After going for a more novel (read: difficult to implement) time-travel-based game mechanic in my previous LD entry, I decided early on that I wanted to do something simpler this time, but focus more on executing it well. I also had space on my mind thanks to the recent beta release of Starbound. The first idea I had that I really liked was a top-down shooter along the lines of Elite or Escape Velocity, but where those games offer you numerous upgrades for your ship, you would only get one: maybe it’s a single weapon, maybe it’s a tractor beam, maybe it’s an afterburner or cloaking device or extra shields. To keep it simple, I decided to go with a vertically scrolling shoot-em-up to allow for simple, linear level design and not a lot of story to write, allowing me to focus on the mechanics. The first generic space pirate name that came into my head: Spacebeard the Pirate. Arr.

Things that went right

I think I did a decent job making a game that accommodates the different play styles offered by the different ships. If not, at least I learned from it. Namely, that offering three different mutually-exclusive options for how to play adds a lot of time testing every single level edit.

Art: To make the player ship, I just drew one “base” ship and changed the color, cockpit position, and weapon/device attached to the wings. This approach worked wonderfully as it allowed me to give each ship a distinctive look with little time and effort. I applied the same modular approach to enemies as well and was able to create a decent variety while maintaining a constant style.

Things that were cut

I originally narrowed down the range of ship abilities to choose from to four: a weapon, tractor beam, repulsor beam, and cloaking device.

The first three made it into the final game. The cloaking device would have allowed the player to sneak past enemies for a limited time. Of course, that would require more complex enemy behaviors, which I also dropped due to time concerns in favor of a simple back-and-forth-while-shooting movement. It also would have been difficult to make a fun stealth game on top of the rest of the game (and pointless considering ~75% of players wouldn’t experience it in one playthrough), so I dropped the cloak ability. Near the end I needed an NPC and was pressed for time, so I guess you could say the cloak ship still made it after all.

Things that went wrong

The cockpit is one pixel off center on all of the player ships. Somehow I didn’t notice this until it was too late. Grr.

Theme? Apparently the people commenting on the game aren’t picking up on my idea that you only get one ability on your ship. Whatever—I didn’t care much for the theme anyway because it was too restrictive in how you could interpret it (See: all of the games where “you only get one [life/projectile/unit of time].” No matter how good many of these games actually were, 100 other people used the same exact mechanic).

Pacing. Too much of the player’s time is spent waiting for enemies to come on screen. When tweaking the scrolling speed, I tried to find a balance between giving the player enough time to deal with the enemies and obstacles on the screen and moving forward fast enough not to be boring. If I ever work on this game more or make another vertical/side-scroller, I’ll give the player control of their ship’s speed and limit weapon ranges so less happens offscreen.

Level design: in retrospect, it was a bad idea to make the levels entirely out of asteroids. This probably confused a lot of players who picked the repulsor or tractor beam and wondered why they couldn’t manipulate the ones which were part of the level boundaries, which were poorly distinguished from the movable ones.

Poorly differentiated asteroids that serve totally different purposes. Pop quiz: which of these can you push with a tractor beam?

Tags: compo, postmortem