Game Design: Shoot O' Space

The original idea of Shoot O' Space was quite different form the current version. Here is how the original idea look like.

The Original Idea

Because this game is a Ludum Dare game, I wanted it to fit in with the theme and the theme for Ludum Dare 42 was: Running out of space. I quickly sketched out an idea based on the game Asteroids. But with a twist: If you miss a target/enemy, the walls around the player will get thicker and thicker, until at some point, the player would run out of space.

Why the Original was Bad

When the original idea was put to practise, I realised that I was doing something very very stupid. The game was designed to feature a shoot-em-up type of gameplay, but instead, it turned out to be way to relaxing, or in other words: 2 genres were colliding against each other! So, I decided to make the walls get thicker as time passes. This way, the player would be able to shoot as many times as he/she wanted and have no worries of losing space. This way, the gameplay would be much smoother of an experience.

There was actually, something else wrong with the original idea. This game, Shoot O' Space, wouldn't be an endless game if the walls would grow, it would be constrained by time. The game would not shout out: Get as many points as possible, but get as many points as possible in this given amount of time. I didn't want that to happen, so I thought up a quick and simple idea: Make the walls not dangerous anymore if the player reached a certain amount of score. In the end, it turned out to be a wise choice.

Colour-coding

I wanted the game to be a contribution to the easy to learn hard to master category, so I decided to colour code 99% of the game. This way, I could explain the rules in a very simple way: Avoid everything that is either red/blue. This just limits the learning curve and the size of the tutorial, no one likes tutorials these days.

Playtesting

I asked a live-streamer to play this game of mine and I learned a lot from watching him play my game. I realised that the enemies were moving too fast. Someone once told me that if you make a hard game, and the player loses, give the player the fault not the game. This way, the player would more likely try again and improve over time than quit the game. Take a look at most rage games and you'll know what I mean. So that is what happened. I fixed the enemy spawn system on v0.2.

That was how I designed my game. I hope you learnt a lot from reading this post, and if you can, maybe leave a comment to tell me what I should've done and maybe give me tips on game design.

If you want to play Shoot O' Space, here is the link: https://tinynerd.itch.io/shoot-o-space