On the night of the theme announcement I sacrificed my sleep just to get a glimpse of what will ~~plague~~ occupy me for the next 72 hours. Needless to say I was pleasantly surprised because I got to use the idea I had in my mind when I was looking through the final theme voting round a few hours before. It was basically supposed to be an arcade shooter with realistic movement based on physics and realistic gravity for planets. I had wanted the planetoids to play a key part in the gameplay, by providing the player with power and such, and also perhaps allowing the player to exploit the gravity of a planetoid to maneuver in space. Sadly the planets ended up being quite useless past the initial start of the game, but they do provide much needed power at first! And also the gravity on them is a bit weak so, umm, yeah, pointless, other than looking cool! Maybe I'll fix that later on. But what I was very pleased with is the upgrade system I implemented, allowing for all sorts of SUPER HEAVY AUTO SHOTGUN madness, and also I implemented a max power upgrade to the game to help the player survive longer against increasing hordes of enemies, which rendered the planetoid power recharging mechanic a little useless, other than at the initial phase of the game, when the player has barely any health at all! But the absolute coolest thing about this game for me personally is the vast amount of enemies which attack you once the game progresses say 5 minutes in, since I'm using an exponential function to spawn the enemies (which also means some machines may be rendered molten after a bit, sorry! I might cap it...). Oh and the enemies die in one hit and explode in coloured squares so that's cool. :P
I have received some critique though, which revolved around the controls and difficulty. I may address the controls in the future, allowing for re-binding and such. As for difficulty I might add some difficulty options in the future, but I'm going to keep the core physics based movement, though I might tweak the thrust of the ship and how the analogue input from a controller translates into it.
If there's anything I'd change I'd probably add more gun types and maybe some different weapons like mines or missiles, I'd also probably include more enemy types. One thing I really wanted to include was different colour themes, which I'll definitely look into doing in the future. But all in all, I was really, really satisfied how this game turned out, and I hope you enjoy playing it as much as I did making it!
Game link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/super-power-frenzy
PS: Bet you can't beat my high score!
