Spacecrash day 7 of 7: game complete!
Ok, 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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Hell yeah. It looks like you took those 7 days and kicked ass. The game looks great.
It was fun following along and gave me a great intro into the world of C. Thanks for taking the time to do this project for all of us.
Great work. Cheers
Thanks to you. Indeed, hopefully this is a good “gateway project” to get started with C and C++ programming!
Thank you very much for doing this tutorial! I learned a lot about this process.
I look forward to the posts later this week!
You’re welcome. One or two more posts are likely (a general “thoughts and conclusions” post, and probably another one with the version fixing the remaining bugs and providing a reasonable difficulty ramp).
Thank you. This was a fantastic experience.
You’re welcome, I’m glad you enjoyed it.
[…] Spacecrash day 7 of 7: game complete! […]
Hi,
I just found this post on r/gamedev.
Your game looks awesome, I’ll be spending mush of the weekend following your tutorial!
Will you go trough how to port this game to iOS? Sorry if this is answered somewhere in the tutorial.
Hey – I’m definitely going to port this to iOS, have to think about how to post the details. It will take a bit of time though since I have a lot on my plate right now (although the porting itself is quite straightforward, basically requiring just a sys_ios module and some changes to OpenGL calls to work on OpenGL ES).
An excellent tutorial. Thank you sir, for the effort.
I do have a question. You mentioned more than once that this is a good portfolio builder. I certainly learned a lot from following along but I am unclear on how a game that you wrote will improve my job chances. I know you don’t mean us to claim we wrote it ourselves (except for any modifications we made).
Would you be so kind as to enlighten a poor ignorant upstart?
Thanks to you Mike, gald you enjoyed it.
Regarding “portfolio-builder”: what I mean is that a project of this size and scope, using these techniques, can be a perfectly good portfolio piece. Of course I wouldn’t use the same game itself. But you can use what you learned to build a game: choose other graphics, or draw them by hand.Chose a different control and variations (for example, racing to the right, and add gravity). Use a different theme, say, deltawing piloting. Add some gameplay twists of your own. The game even doesn’t need not have as many details, an infinite runner would do. And then you will have a game that you wrote which you can use for your own portfolio.
Hope that helps!
[…] Spacecrash day 7 of 7: game complete! […]