I’ve been getting very motivated about a little hobby game I’ve been working on in-between dealing with solar farm stuff, and playing the guitar. I have a lot of really cool space-game assets from my old game (some might say classic!) ‘Gratuitous Space Battles‘ and it just feels wrong to have all the art to make a space-invaders style game and not just do it! I decided to call the game ‘Gratuitous Space Shooty Game’.
I am so disorganised that its simpler for me to code a new game engine from scratch than find the hard drive with GSB code on it (or at least all of it), but luckily I have time plus experience, and I can type stupidly fast, so I’ve basically written a new game engine for this little hobby project. Its nothing amazing, the game currently only uses 2 shaders, no clever effects, no amazing visuals, just a simple ‘shoot at static sprites and enjoy some primitive particle effects’ style game:
Obviously its 2023, so just making simple ‘space invaders’ wont cut it even for a hobby game, so there is a lot of influence from stuff like galaxian, and pheonix, and all the other space shooters out there. Right now, the alien movement is very generic and simple, and nothing to shout about. No fancy splines, just left right and down!
The thing thats motivating me about this game is the small scope, and ease of adding new stuff. When I work on a giant commercial game of mine like Production Line or Democracy, every single line of code or change to a single data item needs to be checked and balanced for 11 different languages and every conceivable screen resolution and hardware, then uploaded as a patch to itch, gog, epic, humble and steam. The amount of admin, and busywork required to make marginal changes to a large project can be pretty overwhelming.
With this game, its 1920×1080 res or nothing (stretched to actual resolution, and bordered if necessary), only in English. And right now its not even on any store. This means I can have a cool idea, start typing code, and be testing it within minutes, which makes the development process pretty fun.
I don’t want to put up a public build for it quite yet, because so much of it is just totally broken, or half assed. The current font sucks, and doesn’t even display percentage symbols :D. The gameplay is unbalanced, and there is no high score system that actually stores anything anywhere yet. I reckon I need to code a primitive online high score system, and include music and sfx volume controls before I make it public. Oh and a pause button might be nice too!
I have to say though… its already very very fun. There is something very adrenaline-rushy about playing it on the harder levels, where everything gets a bit hectic. In these days of F2P, monetization, competitive e-sports, multi gigabyte patches, and achievements and so on… there is something very pleasurable about a simple game where you move left and right and hit the fire button!
When I stick it on itch or the humble widget I’ll post about it here :D.