This post was originally posted on the Scared Square blog on 15 Mar 2016

I’m back! After an almost 6 month hiatus from game development after the birth of my daughter, I’m now slaving away over a laptop to try and scramble a game together.

But wait, what happened to Subtraddition and Gravity Box?

Those games are on hold at the moment. I decided that as my time to develop games is limited, I’d rather produce short polished experiences than longer ones that I never complete. Who knows, maybe in a few months time, I’ll announce another new game, while Splodey Vaders remains unfinished, but for now I think the experience is small enough for me to manage it’s production. Which brings me on to what Splodey Vaders is about.

What is Splodey Vaders about?

Splodey Vaders is kind of a mix between Space Invaders and Asteroids. I teach game design to college learners and one day I was teaching the fundamentals of scripting in Game Maker. As the students were building on the basic Space Invader forumla they had learnt, I was doing the same thing. I started by making the Invaders explode when hit by a bullet and I thought “maybe you should have to avoid the debris from the explosion” and the basic premise for Splodey Vaders was born.

Splodey Vaders is an Arcade Shooter. Shoot the Vaders that appear from the top of the screen, but also avoid the chunks of blown-up Vader that appear after they explode upon death.

Key Information

• This game will be released on PC and Android at some point this year.

• The game will be free for android, but will contain banner adverts.

• After Subtraddition and Procedrill, I’ve grown fond of the gameboy style four colour-palette, so I’ve adopted the same idea for Splodey Vaders.

Where is it at

Here’s a look back on what I’ve done so far:

Here’s my baby daughter playing a very early prototype of the game

Later revisions saw improvements to the artwork, basic particle systems, score multipliers, menu’s, etc.

You can actually see the games current To-Do list on Trello, if you were wondering about that sort of thing.You can find it here!

What’s Next?

I’m hoping to show the game off at a local game dev event in April, so between now and then I want to polish the game to a stage where it looks professional to the public eye. So, wish me luck!