The Aliens

I've been thinking about what to say in this post mortem for a while now, I have never done one before, but it seems appropriate

My game is called TheAliens, it was made in Java.

What went well:

• I think my favorite thing in the game is the fire effect, for the projectile rockets, the thruster on your rocket, and the explosions, I really enjoyed programming the fire, and effects.
• I was proud of the upgrade system, as I have never done that before. It was actually a mistake, as there was supposed to be a design and a testing phase, in the design phase you would design your ship. In the testing phase, it would be like a physics simulation, and you would see how high you could get, but I spent the whole first day making the design dialogue (I was working slowly, as I was not sure I wanted to stick with my game idea). So since I didn't really have a game, I quickly added aliens, and guns, and then made the design phase into an upgrade system :).
• I was happy with the audio and the music, since the music in that game is the first song I have ever made digitally, I thought it was acceptable.

What went badly:

• So since, as I mentioned, I was demotivated on the first day, and quickly hacked what I had into a slightly different game than I had intended, this caused a few issues:
  • The screen space is too small, this is because the game was supposed to be a physics simulation, so the size of the space ship on the screen didn't matter too much. This problem was accentuated, as when aliens come on the screen, you have very little time to react, I was a little too tight on time to make the space ship even smaller, as I was adding the aliens with only about 5 hours to go, so I didn't have much time to refine.
  • The game is too hard at the start, but quickly get's too easy. So upgrade systems are like this, which is why there are not many in the ludum dare, because at the start your ship is bad, so it's hard, at the end your ship is good, so it's easy, so it flips the difficulty curve head over heels. The obvious solution is to raise the difficulty incrementally, to contradict the upgrades, and further, to make sure it keeps getting harder for the user. However, you cannot increment the difficulty, when the user upgrades, because the user can just win on his first go, before the difficulty is incremented, because he hasn't upgraded anything. This is why I introduced the (slightly broken) level system, all it is is a number, that increments every 4000(arbitrary units), and makes the aliens slightly harder, this design structure is pretty good, and it is what I ran with, but it takes a lot of tweaking, and that is why the final game is too easy at the end, and too hard at the beginning.

Overall - I am actually pretty happy with this game. Next time I will probably do it with C++ again, since this time around, I felt like a spent the whole Ludum Dare writing getters and setters :unamused: when I do it in C++, I hope to make a 3D game, I also hope to make some sort of ~~library~~ utility to speed up the development time, so that I can make a more detailed game.

Anyway here is a screenshot (Design Phase):

Here is another screenshot (Play Phase):

Please drop a rating, and comment in on the Ludum Dare page: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/the-aliens

Thanks for being the best community,

Ned