Martian Meteor Massacre

Dev diaries
#1

I’m truly a beginning Game Developer so I’m still trying to get my head around of things. But I want to show you my journey of creating this simple game. This is as much as a learning experience as well as trying to finish a first game. Bear with me please :slight_smile:.

Martian Meteor Massacre is the title of our first game my friend and I are creating. He’s doing the artwork, sound and music and I do all the implementation / coding. This is really helpful to have someone who is invested in lots of playtesting too and giving constructive criticism and/or feedback.

We’ve been looking at a couple of game engines and even started out with Unity before. I was still not satisfied however while using Unity as I found it quite cumbersome to work with. At some point finally a Google search result showed me Defold, I tried it and moved what we had in Unity over to this game engine after doing a couple of the tutorials. This transition worked so well that even while moving things over, new things were already implemented of which I had no idea how to do it properly in Unity yet. This is the engine I was looking for!

The current state of the game consists of:

  • A simple splash screen
  • Title screen (currently only a “press any button to start” screen instead of a main menu
  • The first “level”

Why “level”? Because I want to create a couple of levels that aren’t randomized. I am liking the randomization idea currently though, so that might turn out to be kept in as an infinite game mode.

But what is our game? It’s quite simple, a lot of people already made something like this, since it’s a side-scrolling shoot-'m-up. The level that we are working now consists of the spaceship flying above Mars, while having to shoot multiple asteroids and infested asteroids with aliens on them. Destroying them will yield you some points.

We also needed an incentive for actually firing at the meteors instead of just dodging them, so what happens now is that if one gets out of the screen, the “base” will be hit so this will lose one life. The screen will be lit and a short camera shake will occur to give it some weight.

I’ll present you our latest weapon powerup as well, the laser (currently a little bit overpowered):

17 Likes
#2

Very nice progress! Congrats!

1 Like
#3

It’s been a while, but we’ve been working on this side project still. I’ve learned a lot and redid a couple of things. Whenever I would start a new project I would definitely still do a lot of things different (e.g.: enemies have their own scripts attached instead of having 1 script to “rule them all”). But for our first project I think this seems to be working fine.

We are looking for some feedback outside of our friends group so I would like to present to you the first level of our game. Feel free to play and comment here if you have any issues or (small) improvements that could be made.

Some improvements that have already been implemented (also updated in this demo version) are:

  • Better weapon balancing (make sure it feels more powerful than the default weapon you start out with)
  • When picking up an upgrade, flash the player ship so it’s a bit clearer something changed
  • Music was too quiet
  • Sound improvements (e.g. explosion should have a bit more “boom” to it)

You can find our little playable demo here:
Martian Meteor Massacre demo

4 Likes
#4

Wow, CRT effect is so cool. Great job!

  • The general game speed is slow. We shouldn’t have to wait that long between asteroid sets.
  • Please do not change the speed when the left and right keys are pressed. It is very annoying. You can check out the classic shoot 'em up games for reference.
3 Likes
#5

Thanks for the feedback, much appreciated. The CRT shader is the excellent Horri-Fold extension.

Currently the asteroids (or the waves) wait for you to have finished it all before spawning in the next wave. I’ll fiddle around with either disabling that, or just in general make it all move a bit faster.

Thanks again for the feedback!