Swallowed by the Sun
Controls:
A,D / Left key, Right key - Movement
W/Up key - Jetpack flight
Press R to restart
Team Size: 1
Allocated Time: 3 Weeks
Blurb:
A 2 player action game where players inevitably fall towards their doom and attempt to live just a little bit longer every loop of their lives.
Initial Goals:
- Central big star in the middle of the game.
- Asteroids surrounding the star.
- Players can jump on them to get farther away from the star.
- Players orbit around the star during play and must constantly jump on asteroids to not die.
- Falling into the central star kills the player.
- Respawns would be dropping the player back from the top of screen to next to the other player.
- Players can kill opponent by:
- Jumping on them, pushing them closer to the star.
- Players will get points for killing opponents.
- Players can use a jetpack to fly and hover for limited time.
- Players would be able to downwards dash.
- There would be asteroids that increase in heat as time goes.
- There would be further flame pillars that arise from the central star.
- For additional difficulty:
- There would be irregular gravity changes around the star for additional difficulty.
- There would be random flying asteroids from the background (that can hit the player)
Responsibilities:
- Gameplay mechanics and system
- Gameplay programming
- Gameplay art
- Level layout
- UI/UX
- Prototyping
Overall Evaluation:
As an elaboration mod to https://bfod.itch.io/clone-assignment-2, I think I had a pretty creative, interesting twist to the original game, where players instead fall towards a common center instead of adhering to normal game gravity. In order to achieve this, I had to change how I thought of coordinates in GameMaker, as in order to achieve what I needed to, thinking in terms of polar coordinates was more useful, which I had to adapt into the code. This was used for both the camera and player objects, with the camera rotating radially and minor angle shifts, while the player does the same except with a constant gravity force. I think the players are able to smoothly move around in my game, retaining the smooth physics of the original game, with an additional juicy-feeling jetpack mechanic. I think the art and overall visuals of my game are pretty satisfying (albeit not as perfect as I want it to be wholly integrated). Despite not being my original work, I think the sound design (linked below) was quite appropriately chosen, especially the background music, which added to the solemn atmosphere I wanted to portray. While I was able to successfully implement the majority of my targeted goals originally, after careful consideration and a lot of playtesting, I removed the irregular gravity and increased heat as I felt they made the game too further overwhelming, where the players had to pay attention to the other player, the asteroids available, the flame pillars, potential death from the few available asteroids, all while having irregular fall speeds. By removing two of these, I feel like the game fits the general vision pretty neatly overall and I'm satisfied having met my goals. However, the game is not very optimized for the web build and is laggy in comparison to the windows build. Additionally, there is still a steep difficulty curve and a lot of balancing issues that exist within the current build, which couldn’t be fully addressed within the time constraints.
Sound Credits:
