Release and Reflection

Doodloids is the first game in my self-imposed summer game jam - one game per week until school goes back in session.

This week actually overlapped slightly with school, which means my free time to work on this was pretty extremely restricted. Being tactical, that meant that I wanted to do a remake of something rather than invent something from scratch. Ideally that something would rely pretty heavily on one system (e.g. physics) and would have more an arcade feel than requiring a bunch of level design on my part.

I ended up having working on this for about 5 total hours.

The big win for me here are the workflow I developed for getting sharpie drawn assets into the game as quickly as possible. I'm also proud of the player's ship handling and the screen wrapping. I experimented with JFXR for the first time to make the sound effects and look forward to working with that more.

Gameplay-wise, I think the movement feels good and the dynamic challenge of all the gradually accumulating asteroids is nice. I want the enemy ships to push the asteroids around and gradually churn the mess more, but mostly they just kind of power towards the player and get shot down. Making them indestructible felt pretty powerfully unfun, but it feels like there is more to do in that space.

In terms of areas for growth, I think getting more sophisticated with enemy behaviors and pathfinding would be helpful. There is some weirdness with gems spawning inside of asteroids that I never really fixed. I also think there is more gamefeel "juice" to be applied to the player controller. With a little more time, I'd set aside a whole day just for that. Finally, I think I need to get away from primary colors for a bit. It's always been a crutch of mine, but it's time for a break.

Overall, I'm pretty satisfied with this one.