About
This game was made for a jam which encouraged irreverence, satire and parody, which I’m all for. I spent a total of 190 hours on the game over 20 days and made all of the visuals, music and sound effects myself, which has become standard for me. The game was made in GameMaker Studio 2, the visuals in Aseprite, the music in Waveform 11, and the sound effects in a tool called Chiptone.
Gameplay
The game is a Shoot ’em up in which the player navigates through multiple levels, each representing an aspect of corruption. 7 levels and bosses were designed from which I chose to do at least 3. In the end I managed to get a fully interactive tutorial in, as well as 3 levels, though the final level was just a boss fight.
The boss fights were the most fun to make, though each one took 2-3 days to draw the sprites and write the code. They also required the most testing and bug fixing. By the final boss I had learned a lot and was able to code them much more efficiently and accurately.
The satirical nature of the game was interesting too, I thought trying to balance a deeper message with goofy enemy designs would be tricky but it came very naturally to me.
The only Shmup I had really experienced was Jamestown+ which I occasionally played during the jam to see how that game answered some of my design questions. Since the jam I’ve been exploring the genre and have added many games to my wishlist. So far my favourite has been Ikaruga with its very interesting polarity mechanic and enemy designs.
Further Development
I’ve extended this project into a full game which I have released on Itch.io and Steam. You can read about the full game here. To summarise, I increased the level count to 6 and refined several of the existing systems such as the scoring. These are the major additional features that were planned, some of which didn’t make it:
Reworked enemy movement for more elaborate patterns.Harder difficulty modes, each with more projectiles and limited lives.- Level medals for certain feats such as no deaths.
- A good and bad ending based on the medals earned.
- Controller
and touchscreensupport. - An arcade style ‘Saga’ mode.
- A new level select map screen.
An options menu with some accessibility settings.- Steam achievements.
I also had some more ideas which were completely optional, and of course, didn’t make it either:
Narrative slides between missions.Short challenge levels.Localisation.Leaderboards.
I finally finished the project exactly at 500 hours and am happy with what I managed to achieve in that time. I have made another page for the full game to go over everything in much more detail.