#glitchforce

Here is the final prototype I submitted for playtesting. There’s still a lot to be done in terms of balancing, but I’m happy with the prototype overall. I think it successfully captures the essence of a somewhat bullet-hell type asteroids game that I was going for. 

Like last time, I didn’t get much play testing done. I was hoping to get more feedback regarding the pace and difficulty of the game since I still need to work on balancing, but all of my playtesters have been so polite with their comments!

I got a lot of positive comments about the theme and aesthetic design choices. There was some confusion over the function of the bullets and the missiles. The initial idea was that explosions would award less points per asteroids since they can hit more asteroids at once than the bullets. I forgot to actually code that in, and one of the playtesters that was primarily using the rockets commented that they weren’t getting any points, oops 👀.

I was able to spectate one of my play testers as they played. Initially, they kept trying to shoot at the enemies with their bullets but they quickly realised that the enemies could only be destroyed with the missiles. Another one of my play testers commented that they also didn’t realise this immediately. This is a concept I would introduce to the player in a tutorial, or on the main menu before the game starts, but I didn’t have time to create that. 

Here’s one piece of feedback I wanted to highlight: 

The bullet trails were an awesome addition that made the bullets ‘feel better’? 

This is absolutely why I added the bullet trails! The visual feedback for the player makes their shots possibly feel more powerful. My previous post here goes into a bit more detail behind this design choice. 

On Balancing

Regarding balancing, one of my playtesters said that they liked the fast-paced nature of the game and the incremental speed upgrades. However, they reached a point where they had fully upgraded their damage (5 projectiles) and kept collecting speed upgrades (which I hadn’t put a limit on in the prototype). They were clearing the entire screen VERY quickly. 

This was where I realised that to properly balance my game, I’d need to test it considerably. With different types of players. In its current state, the game doesn’t actually increase in difficulty fast enough to align with the power upgrades.Every 60 seconds or so, the enemy spawn rate increases but they’re too easily destroyed. If I were to further iterate on this prototype, i’d definitely increase asteroid spawn rate and asteroid movement speed as time increases (this shouldn’t be complicated). Ideally, i’d introduce health to these objects so that they’re not destroyed in one hit. Alternatively, the power progression could be slowed down. I did play around with this on my own, and I feel like it’s at a good spot right now.

Further Development Ideas

With all the base mechanics in place, my next steps in exploring this game would be:

Introducing health to asteroids/enemies. This would mean that an object would have to be hit more than once to be destroyed. Perhaps health could scale with time - as time goes on, objects have more health and require more damage/speed upgrades to destroy. 

Another powerup which adds a turret to your ship. Each turret would fire additional projectiles and essentially be a damage upgrade to the player. The turrets be destroyed by enemy projectiles so the player has to be careful with their movement. 

Adding more asteroid types: alternate sizes, speeds, health values. Maybe some asteroids could be invulnerable and must be avoided by the player. This could act as an alternate type of obstacle.

Visual Feedback

In Chapter 8: Digital Prototyping from Fullerton’s Game Design Workshop, Fullerton describes feedback as critical. The player needs to know that their action has been accepted, whether it be through visual or aural means. When I reflect on the games with a major focus on shooting mechanics, I think about how that shooting mechanic feels from my perspective as a player. Particularly, how does the game make my shooting feel more powerful? Looking back at the first iteration of the prototype, the asteroids would just vanish on impact. Bullets would be small, barely visible, green dots. For the shooting to feel more powerful from a player’s perspective, we can change:

How we indicate that an asteroid has been destroyed

How bullets appear when the player becomes more powerful

For the asteroids, it’s simple. An asteroid breaks on impact, so we add a bit of debris to make it seem like the asteroid is crumbling. The particle effects act as visual feedback for the player – yes, this asteroid has been destroyed.

For the bullets, we have a trail behind the bullet so that it’s more visible and easier to follow as it moves.

Another necessary form of visual feedback for the player is when they take damage. Typically that’s represented in the form of the player sprite blinking, or the screen turning red for a moment. To remain on theme, when the player is hit by an object, an “ouch!” text object is created at impact and the animation of the player ship changes to imply it’s malfunctioning. 

Something that might be a bit harder to spot, is that when the ship collides with an asteroid or a bullet, the ship bounces back a bit so that it’s not continuously colliding with the object. 

This event makes it so that the ship is essentially invulnerable for a second after it’s been hit. This combined with the “bouncing back” action gives the player a bit of time and space to re-adjust. 

References

The workshop for this week had us create a very basic Asteroids style game. Although this was a solid base to build from, there were a couple of problems and limitations. I’ve found that the process of creating the game in the workshops has been really helpful in building my own game idea. I’m able to see which things i’d like to change and the direction i’d like to take my own game in. The first iteration (made in the workshops) is seen here:

Some of the glaringly obvious issues include:

Bullets don’t delete upon collision with an asteroid, meaning they can pierce through and destroy multiple asteroids. Perhaps this interaction could be incorporated as a separate powerup since it’s pretty powerful by default. 

A large or medium asteroid hit by a bullet should split into two parts. It shouldn’t be too easy to clear the whole screen (yet). 

No movement :(

Asteroids are spawning in the center of the screen which can be jarring. Let’s instead have them spawn to the sides of the screen and have them gradually move towards the center of the screen.  

Game Pace - Movement Specific

To make the game more fast-paced, I wanted to have tighter and more fluid movement. In traditional Asteroids, the ship can only “thrust” forward while changing direction or rotating left/right. This kind of movement makes it feel like the ship is floating, and is sometimes awkward to control. GDevelop has a topdown movement behaviour for objects with adjustable acceleration and deceleration. For tight and responsive control of the ship, I set both of those values to 9999. 

The ship’s default movement speed is set to 200 (max), and incrementally increases by 10 each time a speed boost collected. After playing around with the values, this seemed like a pretty appropriate increment value.  

Shooting Mechanics

I wanted to explore an alternate option for clearing asteroids. Obviously the most satisfying option would be explosions, followed by lasers. Since the bullets are already somewhat single target, I thought I’d experiment with something that can do more AOE damage – so explosions would be perfect this.

This was pretty simple to implement. When a missile collides with an asteroid, two things will happen: 1) an invisible object is placed at the point of impact to act as an explosion radius, and 2) a timer is reset. While the timer is less than 1s, every object within the explosion radius is deleted. The timer means that asteroids that collide with the explosion after some time won’t be randomly deleted - only the asteroids that were in the area at the time of impact will be deleted. The only problem with this is that the explosion animation starts of small and then grows to fit the size of the explosion radius. In some instances, it looks like the asteroids just instantly vanish because they’re right on the cusp of the explosion radius and the animation isn’t fast enough. I’ve played around with the animation loop speed to get it to a place that looks more reasonable. 

I used Will’s Pixel Explosions from here for the explosion animation.

Splitting an asteroid into multiple asteroids (used when a large or medium asteroid is destroyed) involved checking for collision, and then simply doing the same asteroid creation process but twice. The direction is randomised both times so that the spread of asteroids looks more natural.

Incorporating those changes has the basic shooting mechanics of the prototype feeling good. Movement is nice, default primary fire feels nice, explosions feel solid. I added a visual “glitch” effect to the scene so that the visuals seem more fitting with the theme. I’m happy with how it looks for now. Next steps include:

An overall game timer + score

Implement lives + speed/damage boosts

Spawning asteroids offscreen and having them move to the center

The workshop for this week had us create a very basic Asteroids style game. Although this was a solid base to build from, there were a couple of problems and limitations. I’ve found that the process of creating the game in the workshops has been really helpful in building my own game idea. I’m able to see which things i’d like to change and the direction i’d like to take my own game in.

I wanted to map out the formal elements of my game. Fullerton suggests that the formal elements of a game form the structure of the game, and depending on how they’re combined, the final experience can vary (2018, ch. 3).

Glitchforce - Formal Elements

Players: Single-player.

Objectives: Destroy asteroids, other space debris, and enemy “glitches” to gain points, while simultaneously avoiding taking damage all, for as long as possible.

Procedures:

Player controls the movement of the ship (WASD).

Player shoots (Mouse1) to destroy asteroids and space debris.

Player fires missile (Mouse2) to destroy glitches.

Player can collect upgrades by colliding into them.

Game ends once all lives have been depleted.

Rules:

To upgrade the amount of projectiles the ship shoots, the player must collect the “damage” upgrade.

To upgrade the movement speed, projectile speed, and fire rate, the player must collect the “speed” upgrade. 

To increase the number of lives, the player must collect the “life” upgrade. 

Players take damage from colliding with asteroids or glitch projectiles.

There are 3 asteroid sizes. Each large asteroid breaks into 2 medium asteroids.Each medium asteroid breaks into 2 smaller asteroids. Shooting at a small asteroid destroys the object. 

Asteroids can be destroyed using either bullets or missiles. 

Glitches can only be destroyed using missiles. 

Resources:

Lives

Damage boosts

Speed boosts

Points earned by destroying objects

Conflict: Stay alive while glitches try to destroy you.  Obstacles - asteroids. Opponents - glitches.

Boundaries: Ship “damage” can be upgraded up to 5 times (for now). The player is visually bound by the four sides of the screen.

Outcome: The outcome always results in an ultimate “loss”. As the game relies on accumulating as many points and staying alive as long as possible, to win is to get a high score. 

References

For our second prototype, we had to build an Asteroids inspired game. This time around I really wanted to build around the mechanics of the genre, specifically exploring the feeling of shooting and destroying objects. The final pitch includes shooting mechanics that are teetering towards bullet hell style elements.

Game Title

Glitchforce

Pitch

You’re tasked with keeping space clear of incoming asteroids. The glitchforce is a group of pesky disruptors that are attempting to take over and destroy the spaceforce as we know it. Defeat the glitches as they attack while clearing the way of asteroids and space debris. Collect damage boosters to increase the number of projectiles you shoot, or powerups to modify your primary fire rate, projectile speed and ship movement speed.

Unique Selling Points

Fast-paced arcade style gameplay

Satisfying gun and missile explosion mechanics

Build diversity - do you want to build around rapid fire gun mechanics, or meaty missile explosions?

Setting/Style

Slightly retro/glitch style visuals. Mostly abstract shapes and objects.

Control Scheme

WASD - to move

Mouse - to aim

Left click - primary fire