#asteroids post mortem

🚀 Asteroids Game – Postmortem

This week, I recreated an Asteroids-style shooter using GDevelop. The game features a controllable spaceship, bullet firing toward the mouse, asteroid spawning, and a life tracking system.

✅ What Went Well

Implemented smooth shooting mechanics and bullet direction control.

Used timers to spawn asteroids of different sizes with random movement.

Added working collision detection between bullets, asteroids, and the player.

Set up a basic life system and a “Game Over” screen when lives hit zero.

⚠️ Improvements Needed

No visual or sound effects on collision—adding them would improve feedback.

Difficulty stays constant; progressive scaling would keep it engaging.

The game lacks score tracking or any reward system.

🔧 Next Steps

Add explosion effects and sound.

Implement score display and increasing difficulty.

I got some friends to try out the game I made and their feedback on my game was not very good

Most of the reviews I hear tend to find the game boring.

It's not surprising to me because they look at my games by the standards of the best-selling indie games on Steam.

The feedback they gave, although radical, may seem to some to be the behavior of trolls（ubisoft scare player's suggest xd）

But I think aggressive feedback is often the player's first feeling (same as intuition)

I believe that every player has their yearning game in their heart, and their original intention is to play an excellent game.

Therefore, as game producers, we need to have an accurate understanding and absorb their suggestions.

So I asked them how boring the game was in their opinion, why？

"Actually, it's boring for everything," a player once told me.

:(

Just remember one thing，don't snowflake as a game designer. XD

In their opinion, monotonous gameplay design, monotonous monster design (meteorite only), monotonous weapon style, bad moving feel.

Moving feel aside, this is a problem with the game engine itself.

Let's not talk about feelings for Player Moving, this is a game engine problem.

As for what keeps players playing, Jesse Schell said that people have an experience when they play a game, and this experience is what game designers really care about. A game that lacks experience is worthless.(Jesse Schell, 2018)

I fully agree with this point of view, and I also fully agree that the game I made is really difficult to make people experience, so people think it is "boring" and I understand that the reason why this game is boring is that "the elements are very monotonous"

It's like people get fatigued easily with the same style of artwork.

Some unrealized effects

There are no various bullet designs

No diverse enemy designs

After GameOver there is no button to restart the game

UI

Need make the UI look more beautiful.

Effect

star twinkling effect in background (made by Particle)

Reference

I have successfully created my second game on Gdevelop! From my experience with creating my first game, I believe I have improved my understanding and skills on Gdevelop and feel much more confident in creating games on this engine now. In the prototype game, “Galactic defenders”, I have implemented multiple things into the game. A life system was included and a game over screen too if the player had run out of lives. A large variety of enemies/obstacles were included with varying animations and sizes that would spawn in randomly. These asteroids would harm the player and would reduce the number of lives the player has one until they have no more and then is transported to a game over screen. The player can also attack using a gun that can be used against the asteroids. 

Now that I have completed this game and finished developing it, I believe that I could have improved the game much better and made a more fun game with lots more features. Utilizing my skills that I have acquired over the past few weeks working with Gdevelop, I believe that I could definitely produced a final product better than the one I have created now. 

The good part The final test did not produce many bugs and was working properly and smoothly, which is a big improvement for me. I changed the speed of the player ship's bullets to allow for better shooting of enemy ships and added bullets for enemy ships.

I changed the background and some of the icons, and I added my own design to the style and colours of the ships and planets to give the final result.

Parts that need improvement There is a lot of parts for improvement and the game is not complete. The overall gameplay is very simple and uncomplicated, and the game with GDevelop is not able to perform many complex operations and present realistic combat effects. For example, the player's ship is not easy to aim at when shooting and the arrow keys are not sensitive, which affects the player's experience.

Aspects of the Readings that Helped Inspired the Design Process

The aspects of the readings that helped inspired the design process once again involved choosing one core mechanic and branching off that from chapter 7, and brainstorming ideas and concepts of potential games from chapter 6 (Fullerton, T, 2018). The mechanic I added was gaining points from colliding with the objects unlike traditional asteroids. However, I had brainstormed multiple concepts and pitches before i had decided on this one but none of them involved a mechanic that I personally found interesting. 

Things I Would Change About The Prototype’s Design

One thing I would definitely like to change about the prototype’s design is adding levels and difficulty. In the current prototype the player dies if they consume too much rotten cheese however, there is no reward for consuming the normal cheese and no function to the pointing system. To solve this I would like to add levels. The player would reach a certain amount of points to continue to the next level and with each new level there’d be increased difficulty. This could be increased spawn rate of rotten cheese or as users suggested during my user testing, mouse traps and perhaps a final boss battle including a cat. My users also suggested increasing the mouse’s speed and cheese spawn rate. I like the thought of increasing the mouse’s speed but increasing the cheese’s spawn rate was a reserved idea for higher levels as mentioned previously. 

Player Testing

Sources:

Hello and welcome to Week 7 of my blog. Today I will be discussing my thoughts on the game I have been working on over the passed two to three weeks, Space Jockey. Some topics I want to cover this week are: the things that worked really well, complications in the development of the pitch, and the potential future for the game.

The Good

To start off there was a lot I really liked about this game, especially over time compared to my previous project, Castle Runner, which I felt had more issues with its execution after further development.

Something I really enjoyed was the movement and overall feel of the game, which I fine-tuned over the course of the last weeks. This allowed for some precise shooting for the user and made the current game quite easy because of that, which is good! Since I had such a solid foundation for movement it allowed me to worry about other things like different ships and a boss inclusion.

The boss was something I believe worked quite well, feeling quite epic in size and also had challenge where it would shoot bullets and then change directions every couple of seconds to change the pattern.

The differences between the ships and the way they shot was something that worked out quite well and defined each of the ships and what they excelled in. The Ballista was my prized ship, shooting like a shotgun with multiple bullets which was quite satisfying to use.

The art was a big plus, which I purchased from Itch.io from pzUH which gave me some really nice side-scroller art that I could use for the project.

The Complicated

One thing that I definitely overstepped my boundary with was the RPG elements. Once I realised how much work was involved with creating a system which could remember what I had bought in a shop and then applied that to my current ship I decided to not even tackle it and just follow the advice from my readings of Fullertons book (2019) where I would create a solid design foundation and structure, which I would further refine those details to help improve the core features and fun.

Patterns was something else I wanted to encorporate into the design but realised how complicated that would be, since as far as I could work out, GDevelop doesn't really have an easy way to implement something like that. So I had it randomly generated spawns which feels bland compared to a pattern based movement system.

The Potential

As I was saying before I am very pleased with the end result of my project so far, and am going to continue this idea for my assessment where I need to create Sell/One Sheets of a game design and try to pitch that to someone else for the group work later, as I believe the idea really has potential.

If I had time to continue working on the project I would definitely start with RPG elements and creating a Shop and item persistence so I can start expanding on that side of the pitch. After that I would focus more on enemy AI and creating a couple of stages to showcase the further potential of the game.

Finale

That's all I have for today and I hope you enjoyed my perspective of the project after developing it for some time. Next time I will be discussing a pitch for a racing styled game.

Until then, take care.

Source

pzUH (n.d). Side Scrolling Space Shooter 2. Retrieved from https://pzuh.itch.io/side-scrolling-space-shooter-2