Gun Game Prototype

For the Bullet Hell Game Jam. Unfortunately, PoE league came out and that took every moment of time away from this basically. 

Anyway, this is my second game jam ever and I decided to go out on my own to get a feel for it all. Holy guacamole its hard. As a programmer, theres so much stuff that needs to be done. But I learnt a lot, enjoyed creating it and I do have something that is playable (but isnt really a game nor is it really fun). I am new to this game development thing but it's interested me for the longest time, so Im just glad to finally be producing something, anything, even if its average in quality.

I will say for next time though;

Make somewhat of a plan for how the game is going to play and following the theme. I started without thinking about it and hoped the theme and game would just morph out of it. It didnt work lol.

Experiment before the game jam and pick the tools you are going to use - try not to sway from them. I used a tool for spawning bullets called BulletFury, and it was a struggle to get it to function in the way I wanted. I ended up using heaps of time just fighting it instead of developing my game.

Good free assets that fit together are hard to find. Pick a theme with basic graphics that a baby can do (Im artistically illiterate) and do it yourself. Use cheap tricks to your advantage (bloom and lighting can go a long way).

Make the functionalities into tasks in trello. Pick one, implement it to completion. I constantly got caught up in implementing more than 1 thing.

Sound is very important. Think about how you want the game to sound. Nothing else to add, the entire feel of a game changes with it.

And finally, don't get caught up in an idea that 1) might not be good and 2) doesnt add to gameplay/functionality. I wanted everything to be able to shoot everything. The performance hit from doing this was huge, it was hard to debug and in the end it wasn't even a good thing anyway.

So now that I've reflected (trashed) on my work, this is essentially the aborted tech demo of Hotline Miami. The intention is pretty clear to see with what exists currently, and I do believe it to have potential as a game jam game that I may just come back to one day. I am publishing it as a record of progress, so next time we will see where I progress.