There’s still time!  Rate Gulliver today!  It’s a metroidvania shmup hybrid with awesome 9bit chiptune music!

Posting these mostly for archival…

My first brainstorming document.  You can see some of the other ideas I had, as well as my primary design goals (music!).  I had also gotten the impression that tiled level design wouldn’t be quite too hard, so I didn’t have qualms about that.  I ended up being sort of right, but sort of wrong…tiled level design isn’t all that bad, but I was totally unfamiliar with the toolset and workflow.  I also tried using DAME which ended up just feeling kind of sluggish–Tiled might be a better choice (maybe?  can’t say for sure as I haven’t tried).

More ideas.  I likened the shrink idea to Blaster Master here, and decided I’d use a shrinking spaceship as that would be easier to do art for.

The initial design sketch.  I had originally planned for level transitions to involve a cool zoom in/zoom out transition, to emphasize the recursive shrinking, but unfortunately that wasn’t really possible with Flixel, at least not without bending over backwards to get it working.

Sketching out ideas for the game.

This was my design for the first Space/Station Zero level–it’s pretty much unchanged in the actual game.  After that I started just designing the levels on the fly as it was just faster that way.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 11th, 2012 at 6:01 am 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.