I decided its about time I actually worked on something for onegameamonth. I’ve been following onegameamonth for quite some time (Maybe 3 years?). If I found the theme interesting, I would occasionally write out this crazy doc of what I wanted to build, spend 3 hours making something, and then abandon it afterwards. Maybe its my soundcloud feed and spotify blasting chiptune all the time instead of my normal hip hop and bboy breaks, but my game dev mode has been activating pretty hard lately, so I finally said, “Screw it, I’m gonna commit.”
The theme this month is Tabula Rasa, which is a phrase I never heard of. This is what McFunkyPants posted.
Roughly translated, tabula rasa refers to a blank canvas. An empty text file. A fresh new empty unity or gamemaker project. Don’t add, subtract. Leave some breathing room. Empty space. Start fresh, from nothing. Unencumbered by a bazillion plugins, assets, toolkits, engines, apis, or sdks. This month, try creating a simple game from scratch. Don’t copy-n-paste in ten tons of handy code from previous projects, don’t google for open source code snippets written by others. Just start from a blank file or an empty project and begin typing. Could you write the whole thing yourself? I bet you can. Good luck!
The first thing I thought about was space, which most likely came from watching Cartman daydream about Mars in this season’s South Park, so I’m going with a space shooter.
So far I have this thing…
Its a twin stick shooter I suppose. I played around with different firing rates and projectile speeds, but I’m honestly really liking fast fire rates and slow bullets. I might stick with it. I also noticed that moving and shooting kind of creates those fun little interesting waves and patterns that you see in bullet hells, so a bullet hell game might be a possibility as well.
I’m thinking about having the player’s projectile capable of damaging both the player and enemies, making the player’s own projectiles contribute to the potential craziness of projectiles filling the screen as seen in standard bullet hells. However, I do see a significant problem with that. Considering how slow the projectiles currently move, a player won’t be able to move forward and shoot forward at the same time or else he or she will end up colliding with their own bullets. I could possibly remove player movement and just have a negative force applied to the player, so that every time they shoot, they are pushed back. Disabling player movement also means that players move through the combination of shooting and knockback. It might make dodging harder and the game feel a bit funky, but it could be interesting. I don’t know though, I’ll need to test it.
Overall, I just have a simple twin stick triangle that shoots pew pews right now. What I’m going to do from here is still up in the air.