Mothership!

Introduction:

When the OperaGx Gamejam was announced I was super busy with work and social stuff in my personal life, so I really wasn't thinking that I was going to be able to take part in the gamejam. I figured I would just wait until the theme was announced and see if I was inspired by it. I saw the UFO theme and I love aliens and stuff so I thought, screw it, I've made vertical scrolling shmups before. I could probably use my knowledge from past shmups and just put some sort of twist on the genre to challenge myself and make it feel fresh.

Realistically, this game is buggy and has a lot of flaws. There's a lot that I probably should have focused on first and I'll get to that later, but for now, I'm happy! So let's get into the process of making the game!

The Game:

My first thought when creating a game for this gamejam is that I had to do something that I have a little experience doing before. I had already made scrolling shmups, so I thought that would be a good genre to go with because it's pretty simple and I could get it up and running quickly.

With the shoot 'em up bones in place, my next thought was how could I create an interesting mechanic to differentiate my scrolling space shooter from the thousands of others in the genre. To this end, I did what no other indie game developer has ever done before: I added Rogue-like mechanics .

My first thought and concept for Mothership! was that it was going to be a multi-genre fusion of an auto-battler, roguelike, and space shmup. Initially I had intended on creating a bunch of different little turrets with different types and synergies like AutoChess, Teamfight Tactics, or SNKRX. The player would go through collecting tokens by killing the waves and then when the wave was over the player would be transported to a shopping screen where they could spend currency on different units.

As I started to work on the game I quickly began to realize that this would be way over-scoping what I could do alone in two weeks. So I went back to the drawing board and tried to think about what appealed to me about Roguelikes and autobattle type games like SNKRX and I think my favorite part of these styles of games is the creativity and variety of ways to play the game. I love the idea of randomness and trying to be resourceful with whatever the game gives you. The different unit types is actually irrelevant to this creativity so the autobattler part of the formula was thrown out. I also got rid of the synergies and thought of one of my favorite games of 2021, Loop Hero. Loop hero had interesting builds and risk management, but the items really only modified basic player stats. I decided that this would be a lot more doable for me in a 2 week period and it would still be fun! (I hoped!)

Bugs and Problems:

There's a number of things I'd like to fix about Mothership! The Rate of Fire calculation was done in a really dumb way. So dumb in fact that if you get a high enough Rate of Fire it stops your character from firing! What a bug! By the time I realized this bug it was just too late in the jam to try to fix it. I may go back and re-architect how I do the rate of fire calculations, but that's a problem for future beo.

There's another issue viewing item stats, if you see two items with the same impact on the same stats, you will see the text on the stat as red, indicating a decrease. This should really be white text or something neutral, but I had a deadline and just wanted to get the game out.

I also had a bug with how scaling works when you reset the game to play a new run, this could be fixed with refreshing the browser window but really I would have liked have implemented a proper "new run," functionality.

Another strange bug involved the music playing with the HTML5 version of the game, I'm pretty sure this one would have been a fairly simple fix but I ran out of time here too.

One issue that went unnoticed by players was that there were actually place holder stats that were put in the game but never fully implemented such as life-steal and armor penetration, the item pick-ups can actually affect these stats, but they do not do anything in the current build.

I think there's also a lot that I could have done to improve gamefeel, light screenshake, small particle effects when the player shoots, flashing red before enemies fire projectiles, etc but alas perfection is the enemy of progress.

Closing Thoughts:

The game is kind of a mess! That's ok though, I got it done in the time required, I think the art looks decent, and honestly it's my best work yet. I think the concept is more than solid and this is proof of concept for what could be a pretty fun little game. I'm proud of what I made and though there's a lot that I could criticize about this project, I'm just glad I could see it through to the end. Happy gaming everyone!

-beo.