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the_syncr0281 days ago(+1)

Thanks for playing! I didn't have time to implement a proper continue system as my current restart system came together a few hours before submission. Same with the sound effects, I made them all in PICO-8 which is why they sound like that. It was the fastest way I could make the handful of sound effects I needed. But I wasn't super happy about how they sounded either. Time to learn some better audio processing tools haha.

My entire game is coded in lua so there is a file which has a list of enemies to spawn, also the text to display. And each enemy has a starting spawn location, a location to stop at on screen, and a location to fly to off screen, and the time until the next enemy spawn. With that I just tweaked the numbers until it became fun to play

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EmptyStudios281 days ago(+1)

Interesting, that was the second option I thought of way back when, but figured dealing with hardcoded positions would be finicky and annoying. I guess part of it is how much time and effort you're willing to put into replaying the level over and over to hand tweak it to what you like, maybe I just don't have the patience for that lol.

For sounds I normally use a variety of CC0 sources, freesound + sound packs + personally recorded foley and VO, and then I edit them in audacity. It's not as high quality as professional sound designers who can make some truly amazing stuff (idk how they do it frankly), but mixing and matching existing sounds, tweaking their levels and editing them (and building up a personal folio of sound effects over time) is a great way to get more passable sounds. I still have a long way to go though and I don't think my sound design is top notch, just middling to decent... It's definitely a weird grey area for a jam like this where you are 'supposed to make everything yourself', but imo an important part of sound design is repurposing a variety of sfx and it's not really reasonable to do that only with personal recordings made midjam??? Idk I'm rambling now.

Loved your game, thanks for the insight on your process!

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the_syncr0281 days ago(+1)

With Love2D you can easily set up something that hotreloads the level when you make changes. I had it set up so that it just restarted the game with the new changes and it started right at the level I wanted to test. So it makes the feedback loop pretty fast. However the exact way I implemented the enemy movement patterns is fairly tedious as it is the screen position 0-1 for x and y that it spawns and moves to. In the future I will probably set up some sort of simplified lane system where enemies to spawn and some preplanned arcs to take along the screen. That idea comes from a short series on shmups development by boghog on YouTube.

Also thanks for the audio suggestions. I think sound effects are one of my weakest points as a game dev right now.

It's always fun to talk about the process

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