My LD#30 entry is called Galactic Tollway Authority (GTA). The idea is you manage a tollway system that allows cargo ships to instantly transport across the galaxy by entering gates through wormholes. Pirates are attacking the ships, so you have to create toll routes to bypass the pirate threat while managing your cash.
What Went Right
- Using Phaser for my game framework. I first used Phaser during the last GGJ, and have not used it or JavaScript since, but was able to make my game without any major problems. Thanks to the html5gamedevs.com Phaser forum, phaser.io docs and examples.
- Kept to a graphics time budget. Instead of spending time tweaking graphics and trying to be a perfectionist (since I’m no artist I would never be happy anyway). This gave me more time to work on the code. The one minor tweak that would have been nice is to make the ending gate more distinctive. This has caused some users difficultly.
- Making a web based game. Previous entries required you to download my executable and run on Windows. Since I was using Python this was a large download and sometimes there were compatibility problems for the audio and OpenGL support. Then there was the fear people had of downloading malware. That’s why I decided to switch to a pure HTML5 based platform like Phaser. I’m glad I did it. I think it has made it much easier for people to try my game. I personally, don’t want to play anything but Web based games anymore.
- jfxr for sound effects. iNudge for music. I didn’t spend a lot of time, and got decent results, thanks to the magic of these tools.
What Went Wrong
- Adding winning/losing states and level advancement so near the end. This gives no time to make it more satisfying and properly balance the game. I continue to make this mistake. I was lucky that just adding planets when you advance the level did increase the difficulty, but then I didn’t balance other factors like the cost of buying gates should go up a lot more. Once you get past the first level you have so much cash that cash management is no longer much of an issue.
- Counting on the random planet generation to produce fun levels. It was quick at first to just randomly place the planets. This really leaves too much chance to making a level fun to play. I have a few simple planet generation rules, such as no overlapping planets and a minimum distance so that pirates can attack. I wanted to be able to drag planets around so I could manually generate the first set of levels to ensure they were fun, but never got around to implementing this.
- Not knowing every browser does not support the .ogg format. The morning after the deadline I tried to load the game in Safari and it appeared to hang while preloading. After figuring out how to bring up the debug console, discovered it was related to the music/sound files not loading. Quickly used media.io to convert to MP3 and got that working. Luckily, the compo rules allow these types of fixes after the submission deadline.
Last Thoughts
In the end, I’m happy with my entry. I’ve done about a dozen LD’s (going back to LD#1), and each time manage to get farther along with less work.
I will continue to use Phaser for future competitions. I have a long list of improvements to this game I would like to make before the next LD so I can keep in practice with Phaser. I hope being more familiar with the tools will give me more time to focus on making the game more fun to play.