Solar Blast Development

Play at: https://caffeinatedcrow.itch.io/solarblast

Submission for Mini Jam 131: Solar, limitation: failure is progress

This game jam features a theme and a limitation which must be implemented. Since the theme was released prior to the start of the jam I drafted up some ideas of what the game would be about - these would have to be adapted once the limitation is announced.

After 30 minutes of drafting some ideas I came up with a simple space shooter:

The player plays as the last defence in the solar system defending a sun from enemy ships.

I got started on designing different ships for the game based off of marine animals - since It would be interesting to see whales and sharks in space. After drafting up the concepts, the limitation was announced: Failure is progress.

I deecided to have the player get stronger the more hits they take from the enemy. With the main ideas decided it was time to begin the actual development process.

Conceptual Sketches of Ships:

Below is a timelapse video of modelling the ships in blender:

[I unfortunately lost the footage of the development progress after this point]

Once the models were completed I exported them into Unity and began programming the player movement. I had never programmed aircraft physics before so It was new territory which made me nervous.

I ended up underestimating the difficulty and It took me 2-3 hours to get it working correctly.

Once the hard code was out of the way it was time to add the shooting and sun into the game.

I knew I wanted a bar of somekind to act as a limiter, and so the sun would charge the player's bar when they are in the vicinity of it. The bar is directly linked to the amount of ammo - so when the bar runs out, so does the player's ammo. This makes the player need to go back to the sun to charge up instead of spending time chasing the enemies.

Next was to add the enemy ships into the game. The enemies would head towards the sun and shoot at it. I decided to make them also chase the player if they are closer to them than the sun. The enemies would continually shoot at the sun (with some seconds inbetween each bullet to dampen the diffiulty).

I then added in enemy health regeneration, since they would die too quickly. There would be a mothership present in the game (the largest ship with an icon above it) where the enemies would head off to when their health reached to a certain point. They would resume their mission to destory the sun once they are in full health.

I also added a sript to change the enemies colour (highlighted body parts) to change to red when their health is low, orange when healing, and white when it has health above a certain point. This script does not change the materials for some reason and I spent a long time trying to fix it to no avail. Time was running out so I moved on.

Each enemy bullet's would have a different power, hammerhead ships had 5, sharks had 10 and whales have 15. The mothership has the highest of 50, but moves very slowly towards the sun and only shoots when very close.

I then adjusted the player's bullets to increase with more power depending on how much damage the sun has taken, the more damage the sun has taken, the stronger the bullets become - linking into the limitation: Failure is progress.

Finally it was time to add final bits and bobs to the game like sounds, game over and a timer. The player wins if the enemy ships are destroyed, or if the sun's health is above 0 when the time runs out.

Game over rules:

• If sun dies

• If timer runs out

Final Game Screenshots:

Gameplay:

Future fixes and additions:

• It is difficult to shoot enemies as the bullets position is the players current position, the player moves quickly so the bullets seem to lag behind and shoot in the previous direction

• material change to indicate health

• Adding in more planets to defend

• Right now it is difficult to know where you are in space so a map of some kind

• Display score during gameplay

• Display how many enemy ships remain

• Improve playermovement - very difficult to maneuver at the moment