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.