Spacemissao postmortem

This game was created together with Igal who lives in another country, so  working on this was a bit different than for other games. Fortunately, there was only 1h time difference, so communication was not an issue.

The first thing that surprised me was quite long planning/brain storming time frame. I usually spend only a few hours thinking about general game idea and then I start coding, iterating with the idea along the way. For this game we were looking for inspirations for somewhat longer and I started coding at the end of the day. Then again, it was a bit more difficult than other jams, because there was not only theme to take into account, but also limitation.

The theme ("memories") was not very difficult on its own, quite general to have big freedom in interpretation. The limitation on the other hand ("The game must start and end as different genres") was pretty hard. Basically, it required two distinct game mechanics in a single game.

During the brainstorming session we gathered a few ideas and decided to make a game that would bring back some memories from playing old 8-bit games. And what's better than game inspired by classic space invaders. But we needed a second game mechanics - and there was an idea to combine invaders with some form of a racing game. This somehow converted to the current "warp" mode along the way. This was probably for the better, because it fits the game much more nicely.

We had some issues with how this warp mode should work exactly. Initially player's spaceship sprite was as wide as enemy's. And in warp mode enemies appear on fixed grid that has size of the enemy sprite. So in order to dodge enemy in some tight configurations, player had to be pretty much pixel perfect, and that was annoying. There weer a few attempts to change how player spaceship moves. But that didn't help much, and so the player sprite was changed instead to be much thinner.

The invasion mode was greatly inspired by space invaders. It looks pretty nice, but enemies don't behave exactly like invaders originally did. In the classical invaders, enemies  always move between screen edges, no matter how many of them were still on screen. So when whole leftmost or rightmost column was destroyed, this had the effect that the rest of them had longer path to move. This was important, because it made the game a bit easier. This behaviour was not recreated in Spacemissao however. Horizontal movement was fixed, no matter how many enemies were left.  This is because all the enemies were treated as a group and only that group was moved as a whole, not single enemies. And the group had no idea how many enemies were still alive. Contrary to the classical invaders, invasion mode was meant to be short and intense, so I don't think that was that much of an issue.

The results of the jam were surprising. #2 in gameplay was really good for such a simple game. I think there might be two reasons for this. One - game started with invasion mode, which should be very familiar. But then was the warp mode that added some nice twist to the game. Second thing - some of the games tried to combine two distinct mechanics in single game, which was much harder. The two modes in Spacemissao were different enough to add some nice variety, but close enough so that the implementation was not that much different. 

The game turned out to be quite nice and playable. It would be better with some more polish added: background music, maybe some more sounds, death animations. There's also a few bugs in the game I hope no player notices :) . There's always something that can be added or improved, it's just matter of how much time you got left.