Trash Dev Game Design

  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 ...

  Looks at that exciting gameplay As you can see from the screen shot this is a playable game, a lot faster than the first dev cycle. In fact I'm not sure I could say the last game I was working on ever got to this point.  Some simple code got a score counter in the top right and I just set the bugs to move down the screen and get a little faster as they go so there is some ramping difficulty.  bit of a bodge job This is how iv set the bugs to spawn, I just have about 200 (couldn't get them all in a screenshot) of them go set up and spawned in at the start of the game. Very lazy but it works. Also all those lines and fields at the bottom are limiters for player movement and bullets. I think the game could be really improved from here by a way of spawning in enemy's procedurally or something, so lets have a go at that.  Very important red box Using the same tech for respawning I figured out in my last game I now have a red box that can spawn bugs, I also used the code...

  Behold 10,000 hours in msPaint A new game begins, I spoke about it in the post mortem for my last game and I am happy to say that the first step of this game was to create my own assets. Pictured above are the two enemy bugs I designed, I think their kinda cute, and I already have ideas on how they might act differently and challenge the player. But before we can get to that lets sort out the most fundamental parts of our development.  First thing first, movement. This isn't our first rodeo so...  WASD, the best controls Now we can move and that screen limiter stops us from flying off screen and getting lost. So lets spice things up with a little bit of shooting. B E A UTIFL And I am on fire, this feels good. Kicking goals. We can fly about the screen and shoot, Iv even gone the extra step of shooting actually doing something by deleting the bugs my bullets hit and adding to a score variable. Next post, lets start looking at gameplay.   

Welcome to the starship Merciful Merciful Space   Join the starship Merciful on its quest to save the galaxy from the alien hordes. Level by level encounter more and more swarming alien ships, each with their own movement patterns and gun types with a boss encounter at the end of each level. At the end of each level choose from a selection of ship upgrades before shooting off to the next battle in the stars.  How its Played Simple controls are best and as Merciful Space is being developed on my laptop why not go with WASD for movement around the screen and Spacebar to shoot, I can play with one hand. Your ship will always be facing forwards and so movement will be about lining up your guns and dodging enemy projectiles. In many SHMUPS there's really no reason to not be shooting so you would just be holding the space bar the entire time. To combat that your ship will move faster while not shooting allowing easier dodging.  Three Unique Selling Points Randomly generate...