Score Attack Astronaut Devblog

Over the past couple of days I've been working on my astronaut game and so far everything's going a lot smoother than I ever expected it to! So far I've managed to get the players movement and shooting mechanics all set up and have a working random spawn system for the falling debris and the enemies. 

As  you can see in the preview above there are a couple of placeholder graphics mostly in the form of the giant cubes that fall from above, these cubes will be replaced in the future with things like meteorites and shooting stars, you may also have noticed that the player only faces in one direction regardless of the direction they're moving in. Changing the direction that the player faces is one of the next main things I want to get around to fixing as well as animations for each of the enemies. 

So far I only have 1 enemy type in the game in the form of a simple orange blob (Shown below) but by the time the game is finished I aim to have at least 3 enemies built in. The enemy below may seem a little simple, this is because i want my game to appeal to everyone so I chose to go with a simple cartoon style alien because its the sort of thing that most people will be familiar with. 

Having multiple different enemies in my game will add some variety so the player isn't seeing the same thing over and over again. As well as just having extra enemies in my game I intend to make it so that they take between 1-3 shots to kill to add a little bit of extra variety to the game. 

With the basics of the main mechanics set up I also created a script to control other properties of the game, this script destroys any aliens or bullets that go off of the edge of the screen which stops the game from lagging out or slowing down. This script also controls the games timer which works as a visual indicator to show the player how much game time they have left. The only other mechanic I really need to set up is some way to add a value to the score each time an enemy is destroyed and then the game will be in a playable (yet super rough) state. 

If everything continues to progress as well as it has been a rough playable version of the game should be ready in the next couple of months on itch.io . After that I plan to keep working on the game to polish it and iron out any bugs then work on getting the game working on a mobile device. I'll try to keep updating this regularly for anyone who's actually interested :P but  other wise keep an eye on my Twitter (@markimo2) for other updates.