A return to form: Try the Falling Stars Prototype
Prototyping has returned? Yes. I wanted to a simple spaceship arcade shooter game in Unity and quickly hashed into existence a mechanical prototype within a couple hours. It is a small victory in the grand scheme of things, hell I still will work on it for another day since I hate the feedback on various aspects of it currently (and the less said about the UI the better). Either way, have a small game made in the course of a several hours on a Saturday where you shoot at falling stars.
I already had it posted online encase you wanted to try it yourself:
Now how much feature creep? I started with a galaga clone and may still go down that direction. First it was the wave formations like a space invaders game and I wanted to also do the “asteroid wave” some top down spaceship shooter games have. Ended up making the whole prototype that asteroid wave.
Or maybe not. We are in game dev chaos, there isn’t a burn down sheet, excel sheet, no JIRA or overbearing Trello boards. No, none of that. There is only my mental inquiries and hacking together a mechanical implementation to see if it is fun and if it is not. Design exploration is the intention!
That being said, regardless of the direction at this phase the player having a beam and missiles with a single horizontal line for movement will be kept. Instead what will be explored is the somewhat latent design space for the elements and what upgrades the player could get and how that impacts play. Since there will need to be a difficulty curve and more game elements.
