A short while ago, I created a game in 48 hours. You probably already  knew that if you are reading this. It can be found here. You don’t have to play it before reading this as there is no story to spoil. It’s more of an arcade-y thing. Though it will help you understand what I’m talking about.

If you instead hate me enough to make me explain the game to you, read this paragraph. It is a game in which you play as the alien mothership invading earth while lasering the crap out of whatever stands in your path. Including soldiers, helicopters, tanks, stealth planes and some defenceless people just for fun.

The Good

•  It’s pretty fun to play, not an amazing experience but definitely enjoyable, being that it, like many of this compo’s entries, appeals to the human desire to kill stuff. And fun is the only thing you can really judge a game by.
• The music is thematic and I rather like it. There are two songs in the game, both created in “Garage band”, a menu song and a song for the actual game part. I tried to make the former sound sort of otherworldly and alienesque , which I feel I succeeded in. The latter I had felt should sound like a song reminiscent of those played while knights rode in to battle, something like this.  Though, in the end, mine was simpler and more of a reverie of a more brutish brawl. Still combat-like though.
• I survived my first time. Well, not strictly speaking my first time, I had a go in LD 23 but gave up rather early, and I had an “I’m in” in LD 24 but didn’t even really try that time. So I”m counting this as my first time.
• I had my idea early and stuck with it. I just heard the words “The theme is “you are the villain”” and instantly went to an alien invasion. I didn’t have all the stuff worked out by any stretch of the imagination, but the feature creep worked in my favour and I ended up with enough stuff for a full game.

The Bad

• There are bugs, the first was on relating to my use of a non-ascii character (♫) in the game, which seemed to disagree with some people’s versions of python. I fixed that but others have reported different bugs in which the game crashes, which I can not seem to explain. (As of 16/04/13 this has been fixed for a while)
• Worst aesthetic in the compo. No question. I’m working on my pixel artistry skills and have gotten better. I knew before I started that visuals would be a problem as I have never been good at anything artistic, so I tried to minimise time spent on graphics. If I tried to make them decent I would’ve spent far too much time on it.
• Some common complaints in comments are that the ship is too large to dodge bullets, that the enemies move too fast and that the upgrade buttons are too far from the main controls, all of which I agree are mistakes on my part that I will try to learn from in future.

Other stuff

• The game’s name, “Invasion!”, had no real thought put in to it. It’s not clever or anthing, but it works.
• The game doesn’t do anything special with the theme. I would’ve loved to do something like in the book of “I am Legend” where you are only revealed to be the bad guy at the very end.
• My original inspiration for the game, as you will have probably figured out, was “Space Invaders”, but as the competition went on I tried to move away from that and more towards the stereotypical alien invasion scene.