Astrooter

Astrooter is a game I made in 2 weeks. I wanted to challenge myself to make a game quickly because I wanted to finish something to prove to myself that I could do it. I kept the game concept simple knowing that I was on a tight deadline. I decided to upload a daily video of what I had completed that day to TikTok and Youtube to help keep me accountable, share my progress each day, and build a community.

Game Concept

Astrooter is an Arcade-style shooter incorporating aspects of Tetris. The player shoots projectiles at incoming asteroids to destroy them. Pickups fall every 10 seconds to give the player a power-up with either a new primary or specialty weapon, or an effect to destroy all stationary asteroids. If enough asteroids gather at the bottom of the screen, they get destroyed. The player loses the game if too many asteroids fill up an entire column or the player loses all their lives. The objective is to score the most points with 3 lives.

What went well

Keeping the game simple made it manageable, although there's a lot of other things I would have liked to implement. I learned that when you have a tight deadline to ship a game, you must live with the fact that it’s not perfect and there will always be something you want to fix or change. I also learned that just because a concept sounds fun in your head doesn’t mean it is actually fun when tested. Lastly, make sure to have a list of things to complete for the next day so you know what to work on instead of wasting your time figuring it out.

I enjoyed the process of making this game and seeing everything come together in such a short time. Game jams in the past have been fun, but when you are implementing everything and seeing it in real time, it’s such a great feeling. I also enjoyed sharing this project on YouTube and TikTok and seeing people’s reaction as the game goes on. I enjoyed making shorts and snippets of what I did each day. I summarized everything into about 60 seconds with gameplay to show. I would average somewhere between 50 - 150 views a day, but had spikes into the several hundreds. It’s awesome to see that and see everyone that’s been interacting and suggesting their own ideas, although I didn’t have time to implement any of them.

What didn’t go well

There were several bugs I ran into that I had no idea why they were occurring. I still don’t understand it completely but I fixed what I could and moved on. A lot of code was scattered everywhere and at times it was too much like spaghetti. Luckily this project was small so it only took a couple minutes to find issues, but would have been horrible if it went on like that. Giving the UI design a pass would have been a great addition, but that would’ve taken time to set it up properly while also focusing on usability.

I didn’t struggle learning anything, but I did need to refresh myself on a couple topics like PlayerPrefs in Unity. I did struggle with getting my rows to work correctly with destroying asteroids, but I moved all the level stuff around to accommodate for object coordinates, then everything seemed to magically work after that.

I didn’t cut anything because I kept the game pretty small. I had several ideas I wanted to make but didn’t have time to complete them. I also wanted to create a whole sound mixer to properly mix sounds and make it sound more interesting, but I knew I didn’t have enough time to do that.

Didn’t have any problems making my daily videos besides the fact I recorded everything on my phone. I felt that taking the time to film all the gameplay and record over it on my pc, then edit it, then upload it would take too much time. Simply doing everything inside the TikTok app made it much simpler, even if the quality isn’t perfect.

What I would improve if I had more time

There are several more pickups I would have added. I also would have made different types of asteroids and different abilities. As the game would progress, asteroids would also get buffed to increase difficulty for the player. I would have liked to add a top 10 scoreboard with initials to make it truly feel like an arcade game. Varying the sounds a little bit each time they played would have made the experience much better.

Overall thoughts on the game:

I think the game is enjoyable to play every once in a while, but not something you can play for hours on end. I think it’s a solid arcade game to play for a quarter and compete with friends in. Not something I would pay more than a couple dollars for, especially since it doesn’t have a live scoreboard on all the players from around the world. I tried to make a session be between 5 - 10 minutes long, which I think is about right for this kind of game.

Overall thoughts:

This was harder than I expected. I knew I had 2 weeks to complete it, but that led to procrastination, which means I didn’t complete as many things as I wanted to in this game. Trying to limit distractions was difficult because I thought 2 weeks was plenty of time for everything, but once something breaks, you must go fix it. Overall, I am happy with how this game turned out and am looking forward to making my next game.

Go Play My Game Here: https://thejacobd.itch.io/astrooter