I have done a lot and decided to just bundle it into one last big devlog, but the work was well worth it!

• First, I finally redrew all of the sprites! This took the longest out of anything else, but it was very much worth the effort. I learned a lot more about pixel art using Aseprite, and I think the sprites came out very well. First, using references from Google, I remade the rocket. Then, I made 3 different sprites for asteroids and 3 for explosions. For the explosions, I learned about using several different colors/tones to create depth, and they look very good inside the game. Both explosions and asteroids will have their sprites chosen randomly when initalized. Then, I remade the bullet sprite. At first I thought I wanted it to be a missile, but it looked weird, so I just made it a fireball and it turned out very well. I used the same principles from the explosions for it. Finally, I drew a background. I made some preset stars and then pasted them throughout the whole thing.
• I made some balancing adjustments. First, I made it so that the player can only shoot twice per second, as before it was 4 and quite overpowered. Then, I made it so that the minimum interval at which asteroids could spawn decreased over time as the score increased. I did this by subtracting the score multiplied by 0.005. This makes it so that asteroids spawn 50% faster by the time the player gets to score 100.
• I then added sounds! I was able to get free public domain (CC0 licensed) sounds from this website called Open Game Art, and then used Audacity to make a loop and edit them to fit the game. I got one for the background music and made it loop infinitely and more-or-less perfectly. Then, I got one for shooting. Alongside the sounds I also added a system for keeping track of the sound’s volumes. This was kind of hard to figure out, but eventually I was able to make a dictionary and then a function that would toggle the volumes between 0 and 1. I had to do this because Pygame doesn’t have a feature to “group” audios or mute globally, and the background music plays constantly but the shooting sound plays ocasionally.
• I reworked some of the “UIs”. They are still kind of lackluster, but I added a main menu that the player has to press the space key to enter the game, and shows the controls. Then, I made a game over screen and show the player’s final score. I also made the window have a caption and icon. The icon is just the first explosion sprite.
• I compiled the games into executable files. PyInstaller requires using a special resources function to get paths. This was quite easy to change to, since I have my functions to load assets in one file. I had some troubles with the paths, still, and I ended up moving everything outside of the ./src directory last-minute. The hard part about this was that I switched to Linux a few days before making this project, so I didn’t have another machine to compile the Windows version of the release. At first I found a guide that I could do it through Wine, and then I had to install a Docker image of Ubuntu that had it all set up, but it ended up not working. I ended up just setting up a Windows 11 virtual machine using Gnome Boxes (much easier than having to set up QEMU). It took me a while but it should work. It runs as expected on the VM (Windows Defender notification will pop up but that’s a problem with PyInstaller).

I’m probably missing some stuff, as this was quite a while, but yeah. The game is finished.