A game where you must protect your spaceship from attacking enemies as you travel to a far-away planet to bring back coveted stars for your homeland. The game contains 24 levels of increasing length and difficulty.
In this session, I focused on making the game feel good to play by adding sound effects, screen shake, and music, among other things.
I added five background music tracks, with one being for the ending cutscene, three alternating ones for normal gameplay, and a fifth for menu scenes.
I spruced up the game by adding a screen flash when an enemy hits the ship, particle effects when enemies are killed, a camera shake when an explosion happens or an enemy hits the ship, and sound effects for all of those events (plus clicking buttons in menus)
I had noticed that some players struggled with the first levels, while others breezed through them. To help with this, I added a dynamic difficulty system to make the game a bit easier for players on a losing streak and a bit harder for players who are getting comfortable. I also discouraged players from letting the tougher enemies through by making the special enemies do two damage and the boss enemy take away all three hearts. Lastly, I made enemies more likely to spawn close to each other to maximize the satisfaction of taking out two at once.
To help better communicate with the player, I added a progress bar to indicate what fraction of the level’s enemies have spawned, as well as a reference page with information on all the different enemy types.
Finally, I fixed a multitude of bugs, such as the player respawning at the wrong Z position when falling off the map or a second music player being created when the user returned to the title screen.
Added the spawner enemy, which splits into two normal enemies of the same type when killed, and appears on level 18.
Added the boss enemy, which splits into two spawner enemies of random types once killed, and appears on level 24 (the last level)
Tweaked the weights and enemy count for the last level so that one boss enemy would appear right at the end
Finished testing all the levels of the game and adjusted the weights and speeds of enemies to make later levels easier
Fixed an issue where killing any spawned enemy would result in winning the level prematurely, and fixed the tutorial level, which had broken after recent changes
Updated the checkmark asset to a better version, added an exit button to the main menu, and made enemies stop spawning after the count has been reached
I had been working on this game previously and gotten feedback on its alpha stage, but had stopped working on it recently. After I picked up the project again, my first main goal was to implement the feedback I had received on the alpha version, namely adding more enemy types. In my game, the player is on a small spaceship and must pick up ammo in geometric shapes to bring it to the corresponding launcher and use it to fend off the corresponding shape of enemy. As of now, I have added two out of four planned types. The first is the NOT enemy, which needs to be hit with any shape that is not its, then needs to be hit with its shape. The second is the hardy enemy, which simply needs to be hit twice. It’s worth noting that there was previously only one type of enemy, so I also added a weighted probability system for different types of enemies. I also made a fair amount of QoL updates, such as making new ammo spawn at a more intuitive time and adding offsets to different RNG instances to make the game seem more random (by preventing enemy placement from predicting enemy type, for example).
