I guess I’m kind of late with this.

apocalypse inc. / play+rate / devlog

Apocalypse Inc. is a tower defense-action game depicting the day-to-day struggle of a freelance space pirate bounty hunter duo. when a particularly small planet is being menaced by the intergalactic yakuza, only Apocalypse Inc. has the courage, tools, and style to save the day.

what went well:

• art — my original intention was for the color palette to be randomly generated every time you start a new game. the red, pink, white and black palette was a placeholder, but when people started commenting on it I decided to make it permanent. the art itself is super simple, but bold. I didn’t have any problem pumping out art for this.
• gameplay — I don’t play many tower defense games, and I definitely haven’t made any, so the decision to go with tower defense gameplay was pretty bold. I feel like the game is pretty fun, if for no other reason than the way things feel and flow.

what went shit:

• gameplay— I don’t play many tower defense games, and I definitely haven’t made any. having made other arcade style games, I was able to intuit things like spawn rates and health. I didn’t have this advantage with the tower defense aspects of my game, and that shows big time. a lot of the interface is left completely ambiguous, and things like the lack of wave-based enemy spawning works against tower-building. most everything in the game isn’t very well thought out or balanced.
• programming— holy shit. this game was a pain in the ass to make. I suck at programming, and I especially suck at trigonometry. the circular nature of the game means that pretty much everything runs on trig equations. I spent most of Saturday trying to get gravity and the camera to work. I had to start over from scratch at least 4 times trying to figure that stuff out. never again.
• narrative — I originally wanted my game to be a lot more narrative based. the rectangular natives that you’re trying to save were going to talk to each other and yell swear words as they were being blown up, there was going to be a constant banter between the main character and his in-orbit partner. hopefully I’ll add that stuff in later.

making this game was pretty hellish. I was ready to, and even pretty certain I was going to give up on Saturday; I have no clue how I actually ended up getting this done. I’m not entirely happy with the game, but people seem to be enjoying it a lot more than my entry last year.

I’ve been talked into continuing work on this; I started development blog for anyone interesting in keeping up with my progress. I plan to release it as a full game with more enemies, weapons, buildings, and story-oriented gameplay.

click here to play and rate

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 28th, 2012 at 8:32 pm and is filed under LD #23. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.