Love the soundtrack and design!
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As the soundtrack, I borrowed a set of tracks released under the Creative Commons license by DOS-88, you can find them here
https://dos88.itch.io/dos-88-music-library
I also think that this soundtrack is great and it turned out to be exactly what I was looking for and perfectly fits the overall idea and design of the game. I think I first found the soundtrack and already came up with a game for it :-)
The design and art of the game was developed in collaboration with Matthew Walkden https://itch.io/profile/mattwalkden special for this game jam. He also released all graphic resources under a Creative Commons license, so anyone can use them freely for their own purposes. You can find pixels from this game here:
https://mattwalkden.itch.io/free-space-runner-pack
https://mattwalkden.itch.io/lunar-battle-pack
Do not be surprised that there are two packages, because initially the game had 2 levels of different gameplay, in the first level the player had to control a spaceship, in the second level the player had to travel as an astronaut through the caves.
In total, the development took 3 stages:
- At the first stage, I made a basic prototype using freely distributed art, it seems that it took about 1 week of time.
- Then, after completing the prototype and defining the overall concept of the game, at the second stage, the artist prepared graphic resources specifically for this game and it also took about 1 week. In fact, it was quite difficult, because pixel art and gameplay are very closely related to each other (pixel art seriously limits the possibilities for development, for example, it does not allow the use of anti-aliasing and free scaling, since in the game sprites rotate procedurally, this also required additional tricks and much more).
- After that, I started the third stage - finished the source code, polished the gameplay, integrated graphics resources, implemented special effects, and so on, which took me another 1 week.
In total, the development took about 3 weeks, but unfortunately I did not have time to complete everything that was originally planned: enemy and allied ships, more missions, more special effects and the second level of the game where the player must directly control the astronaut. In fact, the last few days before the end of the game jam, I was engaged in removing elements of the game that were far from complete :-( So the current game is very different from the original idea ( I think implemented somewhere 25% of the goals), moreover, the amount of prepared graphic resources turned out to be more than I managed to use, but in any case they were developed for public distribution.
I'm thinking about it now.
Most likely, to complete the game, you need to rethink the architecture of the program code, since it was not very successful. The fact is that the device of the spacecraft is very complex and it consists of many (more than 10) subsystems. Basically, the idea was that the player needs to fight with a capricious ship and the surrounding reality :-) You can see source code here and see that the ship consists of many components and is controlled directly by physics :-) For example, here a P-controller is used to control rotation (a PID controller is often recommended by many peoples, but I strongly advise everyone to avoid it, because it is not optimal and it needed to configure it manually, while a P-controller is usually enough for the game, because all information about physical objects is known and there is no noise, or better use a LQR for hard simulator games). Also, each subsystem can fail, so the player will lose control of the ship often (over some elements of the ship, for example, if fuel system is failed, player cannot move and rotate the ship) - I think that was the main idea of this game :-). It is also assumed that some elements of the ship are replaceable: hull, gun and shells, also I have plan for true homing missiles, but for missiles need finish enemy AI (I have some thoughts on this - my old project on simple but self-learning AI still waiting in the wings). This approach somewhat complicates the development of the game (it is more like a simulator), balancing, and also imposes restrictions on the in-game user interface. So I still have to rethink some gameplay elements (something will have to be corrected and changed) and reorganize the source code (this requires a total rework), as well as redesign the user interface.
The mission system also requires a complete redesign and it should go well with procedural generation - in the PC version, which can be downloaded from the game page, if the player chooses to restart the game, a new level is generated that is different from the basic one (but this does not work in the WebGL version). I used a simple Perlin noise to do this, but using in game noise library maybe a lot more (although these things should be done on the GPU for better performance). In general, I still need to make a normal quest-system (first of all) that will work together with procedural generation.
Then there are the astronauts, the original design of the game was designed in such a way that astronauts are also active objects - this part was not completed at all, although all the art was drawn with the fact that astronauts are the same game objects as spaceships
In general, despite the fact that I have a clear idea of the gameplay now, to complete it, I will need to redo some things, mainly regarding the software architecture.
The fact is that we decided to take part in this game jam in order to take a break in our main project (it is completely different game in genre and style) and get a little distracted :-) But I'm currently thinking that the development of this game could continue and do something more serious, but first I'll wait for feedback and I will think about what needs to be redone, and what needs to be exactly completed.