Whoops, four months later and I’ve only now posted the completed project. Apologies for the lateness but here is my official post about my My First Game Jam: Winter 2020 submission.
I think for my first game I’ve done a rather good job. Of course for two weeks time I could have had more features and quirks in the game but my excuse would be that balancing time for the game jam and going to classes and doing academic work is rather difficult. Despite so I do have a rather complete game. Complete being that it is a endless shooter game, no levels and no other features except the primary game.
Frosty Space is a simple space shooter with frosty elements. There are 3 enemies, the asteroids, the Hunters, and the Dark Frost. The Dark Frost is only summoned when a certain threshold is crossed. The asteroids are linear enemies that only move downwards and can be destroyed with the player’s projectile or collision. The Hunters are mid-tier enemies that shoot and move downwards. They cannot be destroyed on collision, only with the player’s bullets. The Dark Frosts are boss-level enemies, they follow the player and shoot at them within a certain distance. They have high amount of health thus are more difficult to destroy.
This is my first game but I’m very happy it’s executable at the very least. There is also a downloadable version, in case you wanted to play it in a higher resolution/quality.
Credits
- SFX created in as3sfxr
- Menu Music: Pale Light by Hirokazu Akiyama
- Game Music: “I’m going home for the time being” by Tamu (TAM)
- Font: Team 401 by imagex
Logistics:
- Hours spent in asset creation: 3-4
Pixel art is rather easy if you have a limited space and time. Much rather I had already planned making the art more simple to focus more on coding and building the game.
- Hours spent on scripting and coding: 8-10
I will say that I am more of an amateur coder than anything. And I still think I am. Coding is not my forte as much as learning new language is not my forte. Of course any skill takes practice but as a visual learner I find it difficult to memorize the 1s and 0s. Nevertheless I do think feel that I am able to read code and know what it does.
- Hours spent on level design and building the executable: 7-8
My biggest time consumer was definitely building the executable. Now scripting did take the most time but I worked on the scripts piece by piece between days. Building the final game took 5 straight hours from 3 am to 8 am of the day the jam ends. I spent the whole night finishing the scripts and building the level to finally spend the my early morning just building the thing. The problem was the aspect ratio. I had much trouble making the game look right. One version made the game window too small. Another enlarged my game so the camera was capturing 3/4 of my player sprite and no room for anything else. During the last ones I finally got the window to fit the desktop resolution but I had to change my sprites’ sizes around. Needless to say, at 8 am on Saturday morning, I was very thankful that game jam ends on a weekend and not a weekday because I laid in bed for the entire afternoon, too relieved to sleep but too tired to move.
One game with my name on it is finally out there but I probably need way more to really be a qualified game developer huh?
On to the next!
ContQuest Development Blog 