Well, I guess I should also recap my thoughts about the compo – Not everything turned out as expected. Still, I managed to pull off enough for a playable release.

What went well:

Enemy collisions. I still don’t know if it’s efficient to calculate the distance between each enemy on each frame, but… yeah it works flawlessy for about 20-30 at a time, before it starts to lag.

Sound effects. There’s a free VSTi plugin called “engine” – it produces nice sounds about all types of electric and gas-powered engines. I used it for the laser sound (with a lot of pitching) and for the explosion (with a lot of time-warping and cutting). I can’t say that it makes me a good sound designer, but I’m happy with what I made out of it

What I should have thought about a second time:

Graphics. I created all my assets (with the exception of the particles and guns) in Blender. I decided to use pre-rendered frames to make objects “rotate” in an isometric area. For the floating enemies, it were like 16 frames, the factory was only a single frame, the resource collecting tower had some light animation going on. However… I completely underestimated the fact of how tedious it can be to show an animated object (the player’s exosuit) from all these directions. It took me a lot of time to get it right, after all, the light needed to stay in the correct location, the render-size needed to be sufficient without cutting off the model or it’s shadows, etc. etc.

Content. I set my goals too high. I wanted to have a huge map, maybe even procedural generation, and ended up with… the regular 550×400 px area. I even got a second enemy rendered, but I never got to add it to the game…

GUI. Well, it’s a sci-fi themed game, so one would expect a shiny GUI. But as with most of the other things… I lacked the time, and ended up simply printing the stats down as plain text.

Intro. I wonder how many deductions I’ll get concerning the theme interpretation. I wanted to create a nice cinematic intro, showing the stripmined earth, and the humans looking for resources elsewhere – only the leader of the alien race faces them “You only get ONE planet to destroy”. In the end… I put it as a simple text behind the “About” button.

Music. Initially, I planned to compose a nice track for the game. I ended up with a few sound effects, but … no music at all. Not enough time.

All in all, I’m quite content how it turned out. I’ve also added a post-compo version, since people wanted to use the mouse for shooting (and while I was at it, I also added the shield to the RMB).

That’s about it. Now back to some more LD gaming =)