I've pretty much finished my entry, called Deep Sea Encounters.  I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out, as with all these things there's stuff I could do better but time and budget unfortunately make it the way it is.  Stuff I would have changed - 

Proper 3d graphics instead of 2d

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Sin and Cos are a programmers best friend!  I was looking at other games for inspiration and I saw this image from r-type

A circle of aliens spins around the player and you have to shoot them from the inside.

To calculate the points of a circle is quite easy, the calculation is - 

You probably want a bit of randomness in your game, for example when enemies shoot a bullet or how long an explosion lasts.  However sometimes you want it to be the same every game, so the player will know that an enemy will enter the stage and always shoot a bullet.  You want some randomness, b…

I watched an interesting video on Youtube, showing how iD software re-used assets in their sprites for Doom and how some monsters contain bits of other monsters.  Working quickly and efficiently is a top priority for game developers, especially if you work on your own. 

Video

I needed a …

I wanted the game to have waves of enemies, where 4 or 5 of the same type will appear and move in a predictable pattern towards the player.  I placed some enemies in the stage and it was getting a bit tiresome moving them around if I wanted to move a wave to a different part of the stage.  So in…

I'm going for a slightly different underwater theme with my game, as I thought it would offer a nice change to the usual space ships.  I wanted to do a swirly background effect to mimic water.  I guessed I could do it with shaders and after a bit of googling I found a suitable effect.  I dropped…

I implemented some horizontal scrolling and found that it was not smooth and juddered about, and I realised my timings were out.  I have a viewport on the level and this scrolls to the right.  

The timing of these were not in sync, so I had to re-do the timing.  I don't want to scroll the mi…

The requirement is to create a horizontally scrolling shooter game with no weapons.  I thought that I could have the enemies shooting at you and you could use their own bullets against them.  If you had a shield, you could reflect the bullets back.

I created a quick demo and generated some b…

For a quick game, I'm happy with the results, it could be much better in a number of ways but in such a short time frame it's OK.

I would love to implement smoother scrolling, more monsters, more wall variety, more levels.  

Overall I didn't have many problems, it was pretty straight for…

A quick word on sound effects.  I found a fantastic online tool which allows you to create retro sounding effects.  You can randomly create a sound then there are lots of tools to tweak the sounds to make it exactly how you want.

I created some sounds and saved them as WAV files.  I found th…

Not long to go now!  Today I spent a couple of hours on the game, and added a few new features.  Monsters now drop loot, either gold, spell scrolls or health potions.  I added treasure chests which can be collected and give you gold.

I also added a title screen and instruction screen, did so…

I've put in collision detection so you can't walk through walls and I added some skull monsters, which roam the maze.  If a monster sees you, it will walk towards you, otherwise it will go in one direction, until it hits a wall.  It will then choose a random new direction.

It's all coming to…

I have designed a simple map which is stored in an array, 0's represent corridors (empty space) and 1 is a wall.  The player can face 4 directions, North, East, South and West.  I am checking the player's X and Y position and their direction and drawing wall sprites from furthest away to nearest…

I'm going to have a go at the Dungeon Challenge, and I thought I could produce a game in the time scale required.  I have a confession to make, I have made a dungeon game before.  Deepfall Dungeon was a game I wrote a few years ago and it was a retro style 3d dungeon adventure game.  There are s…