Whiffle Six post-mortem

assertivist on 2019/04/14 04:05 of Hopeless Opus 7
— edited on 2019/04/14 04:07

First of all I want to thank the 13 people who downloaded and ran my game, and left all the thoughtful reviews. I totally get the DQ vote we got, we had a really turbulent week and couldn't decide on gameplay--by the time I had something together it was far too late to put together a story loosely connecting our game to the theme...

Our first idea was a kind of top-down adventure/arcade where you play as a group of six dragons. We planned out six different biome types scattered around a large map requiring you to switch between the dragons strategically--definitely something like what Breakout Blue came up with but simpler. I got pretty far with that idea before we pivoted because there was just not enough time to fill out this idea.

My teammate said "Let's just make scrolling breakout," and away I went. Originally we were trying to go right to left scrolling, but I was having trouble thinking how I would make that work without the ball always just kind of falling behind to the left... So I went with a top-to-bottom bullet hell type of idea. There was a lot more I wanted to get added before the week ended, including power-ups, including one giving you a weapon, some flying/shooting enemies, I wanted to go for Arkanoid vs Juno First, a somewhat uncommon arcade game that I immensely enjoy. But I spent too much time twiddling with physics and collision detection, as is typical for pyweeks past for me, and I ended up with what you saw. 

Its funny that some people found it too easy--the difficulty is supposed to increase the longer you play, but I ran out of time to get it scaled well. When I first implemented the scaling it got really hard really fast, I probably should have just left it like that :)