The first thing that came to mind when hearing “10 seconds” was “kill as many enemies as possible in 10 seconds”.  I started this LD with a laid back attitude.  I had other important things to do in the week-end, such as relaxing on the beach and visiting friends on my last vacation days.  And I just wanted to do something that I personally find fun and inspiring.  To hell with the ratings, which many people think suck anyway (I myself prefer constructive comments over numeric ratings).  So I stuck with this simple but fun idea.  The enemies were going to be totally stupid.  It’s the weapons that have interesting behaviour.

I spent little time coding on Saturday, just fiddling around with graphics and level layouts to see if I could find something that inspired me.  But when I created the bullet bouncing mechanic, I found that this simple mechanic can result in some interesting gameplay, so I stuck with it.  From Saturday night onwards I had a blast creating funny and interesting weapons, which took most of Sunday to implement and balance.

I decided to have the player play through all the levels without the need to “complete” any level before proceeding to the next.  I just wanted the game’s appeal not depend on anticipation of the reward to see the next level for a change, something I got fed up with after playing too much WOW.  The result is that the player is taken through a dazzling array of weapon mechanics and graphics in the span of two minutes.  And hopefully think, wow, let’s try that again!  Or maybe not, then at least the game has been entertaining for two minutes, which is not too far off from the recommended time to spend on a LD game review.

The graphics are mostly procedurally generated, using my sprite generator, and Evolvotron (a linux-only program). I spent a little over an hour on them, and it appears people like them, so I consider them a success.

Sound was added 30 minutes before the deadline.  I decided to have the game trigger lots of “rapid fire” sounds, resulting in a sort of “ambient” noise, which I thought sounded quite OK when I used multiple slightly different samples for each sound. Unfortunately the sound is a little too loud compared to most games, and when it’s on loud, it sounds rather grating and unpleasant, as sfxr sounds tend to do.  As is, the game is probably going to score lower on sound than a game without sound, which I believe scores about 2 stars on average.  So, please turn the volume way down to make the game sound better.  Reminder for next time: lower the volume by 6db for sfxr samples!

Which brings us to some other things that didn’t turn out so well.  First of all, the game is too random, you need luck to complete some levels, and just shooting in random directions is a reasonable strategy.  That’s the most important flaw I think, but it can be fixed.  I am a little surprised I still find it enjoyable despite of that, in fact it has the same kind of appeal as a coin drop machine.  Another is that the game probably lacks character. No cool intro or characters, no compelling or funny storyline.  I am very bad at this sort of thing.  I must admit, I personally don’t consider it important, but I know some other people do.

About the “kill as many enemies as possible in 10 seconds” concept, I wonder how many people though it up, but abandoned it because it was too obvious.  As yet, I have to find a game that follows the same concept.  I do hope to find some before rating ends!

Oh, I almost forgot… play the game here.