Space Bits Survival

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GAME INFO:

VERY early proof-of-concept / work-in-progress twin stick shooter prototype.  

I currently call this game "Space Bits Survival", because the original asset artist (linked in Credits below) has "Space Bits" in one of the asset pack screenshots, and I couldn't come up with something better!  I may change the name at some point...

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HOW TO PLAY

Gamepad:

• Left Stick:  Move Ship
• Right Stick:  Aim and fire weapon
• Press Start button on menus to start the game.

Mouse + Keyboard:

• WASD:  Move ship
• Mouse:  Aim weapon
• Mouse Left Click:  Fire weapon
• Click the on-screen UI start buttons to start the game.

Goal:

• Survive for as long as possible!
• Enemies will sometimes drop score multiplier pickups.
• After destroying 20 enemies, a weapon powerup pickup will spawn!

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Future Update Goals / Ideas:

• Larger, more interesting levels, camera that moves with player.
• Game is in a VERY early prototype stage and needs LOTS of polish and optimizations.
• Currently, there are only three enemy types and all they do is move towards the player at different speeds.  Add more enemies and enemy behaviors.
• Better / more interesting enemy spawn patterns.
• Visual spawn "warnings" (i.e. show the player where an enemy is about to spawn).
• More/different weapon powerup types.
• Save data / permanent upgrades (currency pickups, etc).
• Player ship selection.
• Dash / invincibility while "dashing"
• Make this page less crappy :)

Please feel free to post any comments / suggestions!

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Credits:

Programming by Richard Skala (me!)

Art by Gustavo Vituri:  Space Shooter Asset Pack

Sound Effects by SubspaceAudio:  6000 Retro Sound Effects

Pixel Crosshairs by Donut Studio:  Pixel Crosshairs

Font:  Press Start

Built in Unity

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Various Dev Notes:

• My first implementation of weapon firing had the player aim with the right stick and press and hold the right trigger to fire. While this works in a twin stick shooter type game like Nuclear Throne, in a hyper fast-paced game like Geometry Wars, right-stick continuous fire felt better.
• I originally had multiple sounds randomly selected when playing the player ship firing sound, but I felt the variations in the sound was really annoying, so I found the shortest sound effect and only used that one.
• Originally, a "Score Multiplier" pickup item was spawned EACH time an enemy was destroyed. However, there was SO much stuff on the screen as a result, that it was really hard to tell what was going on in the game, so I reduced it to a 25% chance to spawn to reduce the visual cacophony.
• Enemies have a period of 1 second after spawning where they will NOT hurt the player. I added this because the current (first-pass) implementation of player spawning just gets a random position in the game world and spawns an enemy there. This could happen right on top of (or close enough) to the player, which would outright kill the player, which was no fun!  This gives the player a chance to see and avoid an enemy that just spawned.

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