…aaand the game is online. In fact, it has been since Monday (one day later than I wanted it to) and you can play it at Kongregate. Finding good names is always hard for me, so it’s called “Snipe’em up”. Enjoy!

What I’ve learnt: Integrating social APIs is far easier than I feared it was - or, at least, it is with the Kongregate API. Unity is awesome, but I knew that before. Getting visibility (and, thusly, feedback) on Kongregate is pretty hard, unless you actually make it to the very top of the rankings. This looks a lot simpler on other browser game platforms, like Newgrounds and Armorgames, and I might actually go elsewhere with coming games.

On the technical side, I’ve finally gotten some practice with Colliders, something that doesn’t come up too often in my main project, and got some new ideas on how to structure code, especially for very small projects that don’t need much reusability.

And finally, on the game design front, I had some time to ponder how the Danmaku genre works, which was interesting. I’m pretty new to this genre, which I only checked out a couple of weeks ago because slowbeef talked about it on Retsutalk and it sounded interesting and far less hard than it was, so I got Crimzon Clover WORLD IGNITION on Steam. It’s actually a fun journey for me and I feel like I’m getting better all the time.

But enough talk about good games, let’s go back to Snipe’em Up. What would I do different if I had more time? Some nice pixel art instead of the quick&dirty shapes I’m currently using. I suck at pixel art, but could probably manage something acceptable for those few sprites I need in a game of this scope. And the music isn’t really what I wanted to have, but I had to go with what I could got. So, have some epic orchestra music with your black&white GIMP brushes.

Anyway, since I don’t have a usable idea for my next project (with a slightly bigger scope, this time - maybe about one month), I might as well try my hand at a better looking, smoother, longer and more varied Snipe’em Up II. We’ll see. My other ideas are a Horror Metroidvania Thingy, or maybe a purely sprite-based 2.5d train driver arcade game in the style of Densha de Go!. But so far, neither of those two really seems like the right game for me, because both would require substantial amounts of artwork and my artwork sucks, like I said before.

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