And you probably thought I wasn’t still making games right?
After the long and intense development of Democracy 4, which is a HUGE sprawling game with a LOT of code, and a ton of content, and is now in about 10 languages and has 3 expansion packs… it was nice to be able to make something small, and simple, and not at all commercial or serious. With that in mind I started messing around making a space-invaders style vertical shooter, using the art assets I have from an older game of mine: Gratuitous Space Battles.
GSB is pretty old now, but TBH the spaceship graphics for it still look incredibly good to my eyes. I generally think its very wasteful that the games industry hires so many people to make music, SFX and graphics, and then makes a single game with them, never to be re-used in any way. Frankly a spaceship is a spaceship, whether its used in an RTS or a shooter or a turn based grand strategy game.
I know some people worry that gamers will bombard you with abuse for daring to use the same artwork in another game, because they will feel ‘cheated’. This strikes me as utter nonsense. Sensible re-use of assets just makes sense. As a general principle I hate waste, and I love efficiency. Also, not doing something because a tiny, tiny percentage of vocal gamers may complain about it is definitely a losing strategy in gamedev. There are always people who complain about any choice you will make.
After working on this game for a bit, and initially thinking it was a little throwaway thing I’d probably keep to myself, I started to really enjoy its development. I have never made a vertical shooter, but I loved Star Monkey, which is very old, and I am old enough to remember the first space invaders arcade cabinets as a kid, as well as Galaxian (far superior imho) and then Phoenix and the rest. I also spent a lot of time playing Astrosmash on our intellivision console as a kid.
Gratuitous Space Shooty Game is a bit of a mashup of a lot of those shooters, with some extra ideas that occurred during development. My wife playtested it a lot, and HATED the asteroids, so I added a repulsor beam to keep them away from you. Once implemented, it became a very cool new gameplay mechanic, as it allowed you to ‘balance’ attacking ships above you to get some extra shots in before they leave the screen.
During development I experimented with a bunch of ideas, and after a lot of playtesting, I’m happy with what I chose to do. The fact that you can accidentally shoot ship bonuses gives the player an incentive to keep moving and not risk a volley destroying a bonus. Penalizing you for every ship that escapes, INCLUDING the left-right ‘saucer’ ships also adds to the challenge. Making it so that the best power-ups are only dropped by those ships was also a good move from a design POV. Adding friendly ships you have to avoid is an evil mechanic, but its still in there!
In the end I went with 25 levels, and the levels get slightly longer as you go along. I don’t do any adaptive difficulty stuff, although I considered it. I do offer 3 difficulty levels from the start though. The top one is seriously hard. In-between levels you get to spend your cash, earned from shooting aliens and collecting bonuses (and a cool 10% bonus if nobody escapes) on upgrades for your ship.
Right now the game is only on itch, for $3 with a suggestion of $5 if you want to. It will not be a big financial success :D. Because I was doing it for fun, its currently windows only, and fixed aspect ratio of 1920×1080, or scaled to fit fullscreen. Windowed option literally went in the day before release :D. Its English only for now. I may try a google-translate for the limited text at some future point if I do an update to it.
So there you go, its another game by me! the first non-strategy one for a long time. I’m quite proud of it. Its a fun short laptop-friendly game you can play in lunch hour or multiple coffee breaks. If you like the look of it, get a copy!