Merciful Space SHMUP Postmortem

 


Goodbye Merciful Space

Its the end of space, on to the next dev cycle. So lets look at what happened here. 

Same as last time, few things that went right, few that went wrong.

Successes
  • I actually have a playable game. I didn't kick every goal I was going for but unlike my first game this one can be played and you can be good or bad at it. I even found myself getting distracted by playing it when I should have been working on it.
  • The art assets aren't as high quality as those given out but these ones are mine and they have character. Its got soul, and I am so proud that I'm using my own art. It also makes the game feel so much better because every part feels like it fits together.  
  • I made a game that was my game and not just the game being used as an example in class, everyone else made a copy of asteroids. Asteroids is a good game but Merciful Space is my game, and I feel like I did so much more for that.

Failures
  • Ok so I didn't talk about this in a dev post but oh man, let me tell you about scrolling backgrounds. I tried so hard for so long to get a scrolling space background thing going so it actually felt like you were flying up and through space, I watched a dozen tutorials. I copy pasted code from other peoples projects. I did everything I could and it just didn't work, even the tutor was stumped. I hated this part of the dev cycle. God damn scrolling backgrounds.
  • Time, again, was not on my side. This time I kept my project small and to the point but I had other assignments to attend to and I just edged out onto about half of what I attempted to do.
I think I actually did pretty good on this one, other the bloody scrolling background the only issue I have with this is I didn't get around to doing what I wanted to do. With more time I am sure I could implement enough of what I had hoped for to actually call this something worth playing. The type of game you might of seen on NewGrounds back in the day. 

Third times the charm, join me next time for a racing game. 
         

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