Spacecrash day 7 of 7: game complete!

Screen Shot 2013-09-01 at 11.04.16 PMOk, so the last day arrived and I had a chance to do the following critical things:

  • Fixed the pending bugs (hopefully all of them)
  • Adjusted gameplay: completely removed fuel, and removed manual accelerating/braking
  • Added sound effects for crashes, explosions, rockets, spaceship engine, etc…
  • Added particle-based explosion effects
  • Added cool techno background music
  • Added score to in-game UI
  • Beautified main menu, completed info & credits
  • Made the game save and restore options and current progress

The end result is that we have something that looks very cool, watch:

Spacecrash: Day 7 of 7 from Jon Beltran de Heredia on Vimeo.

There is only one main thing that has escaped the week-long budget: adjusting and balancing the gameplay. Currently, the game is very easy in the first few levels, and then, level 4 becomes nearly impossible – I’ve played it a lot and I can’t get past it, it’s possibly doable with more time, but then level 5 is probably totally impossible. The point is not actually the difficulty, that would be easy to adjust, it’s that there isn’t a properly structured challenge progression. This requires a bit more time, although I already have some ideas that will probably work. Together with this, I need to add behavior to drones (my idea is that they will come flying down when they detect the spaceship coming).

Apart from this gameplay thing, there is also some polish missing: an app icon, and a couple minor glitches here and there.

I plan to work on this aspect at some point next week (it can’t be tomorrow, I have a lot of urgent catching up to do with other work projects). But I think I will be able to prepare a cool new version in less than one day of work.

I am not going to post any code today, there are quite a few small changes everywhere, but it’s more of the same stuff we’ve seen: just more calls to PlaySound(), CreatePSystem(), etc…

You can download the materials here though: the package with Spacecrash source code, data and installer projects, the Spacecrash Windows installer, and the Spacecrash Mac OS X installer.

Day 7 conclusions

I’m really happy with what I have achieved in a week, it’s always really cool when you see everything put together with music, effects, etc… I probably need one more day of work for the gameplay work, and of course you can spend as long as you want improving and all game aspects, but this is approximately at the quality level I was expecting for a week-long project. It’s definitely a portfolio-quality game that would strongly help you to be considered for a job at most game development companies.

I will post another more detailed article shortly, with high-level conclusions, thoughts, and next steps. For now, I am just going to rest a bit. Hope you liked it!

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