Zeroth Prototype

Introduction

Hi Everyone! Welcome to our devlog series, we are Serenade Industries, an indie duo, and this week we launched our little indie studio!

To get started off on the right foot we have decided to first explore some concepts, designs and game styles - and this is the first demo in that series!

We gave ourselves one week to go from concept to release, a few strict limitations to stay on target. As we do more of these we plan to try different limitations, different concepts, and spend each week focused on a particular mechanic, style or idea.

Day 1: Concept

This goal of this first week was focused on setting up our environments, making sure we could easily work together, exchange code and assets, and ultimately get something released - not about creating the absolute best game we could imagine. 

As such we wanted to pick a fairly basic game concept, with a few simple mechanics that we were comfortable implementing and playing with. Minimal surprises.

We settled on a basic arcade space shooter, with a few particular trimmings, and the theme: Big Cats. Defending Space. From Alien Robots.

Day 2: Limitations (Design and Art)

We did not want to spend the entirety of our first week making art assets. We could have easily spent months on just fleshing out the concepts so we set a few strict limitations:

• With the exception of background art, all other objects must be created in game from polygons, simple shading, and lighting tools.
  
• All sounds must either be very simple to synthesize or public domain.
  
• All "animation" must be created through particle effects, simple object manipulation (rotation / transformations) and lighting tricks.

This ended up working really well for the style we eventually settled on, and gave the whole game a comic-book feel.

For the background art we created a few simple planets in GIMP and a nice deep space background – which eventually came alive with some parallax scrolling.

Sound Effects and Music

Like the art we made all of the sound effects ourselves. Some with our voices, some audio manipulation, and others through synthesisers and some tweaking. We kept to the basics: laser shots and explosions and ship movements. The one sound effect we spent more time on was the "Leopard Boost" which after playing with a few different effects, we concluded needed some more attention - the result was a 3-part pipeline going from sfxr to Audacity and then manipulated directly in Godot.

For the background music for the level stages, we found some public domain pieces that suited the style from https://gamesounds.xyz/?dir=Public%20Domain

Fonts

We kept the font style simple, with a single font called Kenny Future (CC0 1.0 Universal) from: https://kenney.nl/assets/kenney-fonts

Day 3-6: Working on the Game Play (Two by Two)

Once we had the basic mechanics of level loading, ship movement, bullets firing, and asteroid dodging in place it was time to actually build out the game.

There are two of us, so to build some variety, we decided to build two different ship designs, two different levels, two different enemies, and two different boss battles.

Two Ships: Tiger Agility and Leopard Boosting

The Tiger ship, as seen above, features a lovely striped design and a special move which flips the ship over to allow you to pick off enemies from behind you.

The Leopard ship is covered in spots, and features a special boost move which surges the ship forward, providing a moment of invincibility and leading to some rather interesting gameplay - like clearing the path forward with asteroids.

Two Enemies and Two Levels: Turrets and Ships

The levels are very similar in style. Both are set in asteroid belts, and both have you facing off against the first enemy: the turrets. These spin in place to fire at trespassers, but also make themselves easy targets - even to themselves and asteroids.

The second level features a new enemy which is a bit more difficult to deal with. It will move around obstacles and force you into tight corners to shoot it down – or to grab a needed power up.

Two Boss Battles: Mining Mothership and the Rawrgate

Both of the end-level bosses are multi-stage fights. In the first level you face down a giant mining robot, covered in the turrets you faced earlier in the level, and the player will need to take them out one by one, and quickly in order to survive.

The second boss is very different, an intra-galactic portal used to send through reinforcements. Quite defenceless by itself, but if you are not careful those extra turrets and ships will get you!

This required some play testing to get right. Too many phases the boss felt long and drawn out, too few and it was too easy and the effect was lost.

Last Day: Scores, Credits, and Infinite Mode

The final mode that we built allows an infinite-play experience, gliding through an endless asteroid field, facing down random enemies and trying to survive for as long as possible.

Most of infinite mode we were able to cobble together from code we had originally wrote for the second boss. Breaking out the random object generator and tweaking the probabilities and setting multiple of them up to stay just off screen of the player.

As long as you stay focused on the goal it isn't too hard, but a moment's slip in concentration will have you hurtling into an asteroid or being picked off by turrets.

Finally, we brought together the two levels into a cohesive narrative, and displayed some end of demo credits after defeating the second boss.

Thoughts and Sign Off

Overall we are really happy with how this week went. The most important thing is that there is a game that didn't exist before we started, that looks pretty good considering the time limitations.

All of our flows worked well, we successfully tested out solutions to quickly sharing code back and forth without heavy infrastructure (git daemon), and we ran through all the stages necessary from design to release to this post. We are very excited to move onto the next prototype game.

Please go check out Roarifaction on Itch and tell us what you think. And if you would like to see more of these devlogs and prototype games then please like, and follow us on Itch: https://serenadeindustries.itch.io and on Twitter: @serenade_ind

Have a great day!