Meteor Masher

Description

Meteor Masher is an arcade style SHMUP (Shoot 'Em Up) where you ran out of ammunition. Given that you're a patriotic imperial soldier, you've had to resort to other means to enact violence. Now you have to bounce meteors around to eliminate your enemies, brick breaker style.

Background

This was what I created for my first assignment as part of the "Game Studio" class in RRC's Game Development program. As part of this assignment, we were given a number of incredibly simple scripts and told to make a 2D game WITHOUT WRITING A LINE OF CODE. These scripts included things like timers, on-collision/trigger events, simple WASD/arrow key movement scripts, and a single input event mapped to the spacebar. We had to beg our instructor to give us something as simple as a counter script or scene loader.

I'm friends with a lot of people who've gone through this program, so I've had ideas for this assignment cooking on the back burner for a while. My idea was always to do something similar to space invaders, but I hadn't figured out a strong gimmick for it until I actually got the assignment. I have some very fond memories of playing brick breaker on my mom's old flip phone, so the instant I came up with the framing device of bouncing a meteor around using your ship's shield, I knew what this game was going to be.

Goals

Make a game inspired by Brick Breaker and Space Invaders, and do it without writing any code, using only the scripts given and whatever I could find built into Unity.

Reflections

What went right:

Two words:
Tractor Beam.
Everyone who played this game really loved it. And I wholeheartedly agree. That mechanic is the beating heart of the game, which is insane because I added it on a whim to solve an annoying problem. It wasn't even in my initial pitch document. But just because it wasn't planned doesn't mean I don't love it very dearly.

What went wrong:

In retrospect, the game starts way too slow. I thought it would be funny to open the game with a Star Wars text crawl with esoteric lore that parodied imperialism a la Starship Troopers.
And it was. To me.
Other people thought it was charming at first and then immediately hit the spacebar to skip through it. Watching that happen a dozen times made it very clear to me that I should have just let the player jump right into the action.

Overall Thoughts:

Given the tight restrictions I faced for this project, I'm very satisfied with what I was able to pull off, especially since this was my second project in Unity. While not being able to code may have been a frustrating restriction at first, in the end it turned out to be incredibly useful, because it forced me to try and work with the engine to find solutions to problems instead of just retreating to visual studio to try and brute force it. This project showed me just how resourceful I can be even under incredibly tight restrictions. I had a lot of fun with it, and I fully plan to revisit it at some point.

A Fun Fact About This Project

To this day my biggest game dev flex is that Rami Ismail played this game and he enjoyed it. He also said it needs to be a lot faster, but that will be addressed when I return to it. I have ideas...