Covid19 Destroyer Postmortem

What went right

Having a topically-themed game helped get some feedback and people to play it, so that counts for something. Also participating in my first game jam was a good experience. I think I got a better idea of adding effects and feedback from the game on how the player is doing, when you are advancing to the next level, etc.  
Feedback:
“I played. England kicked my butt! Big ol' virus guys got me! Pretty fun.”
“Tested it and got as far as France at 23 thousand points. Reminded me of my brother's old Atari Game. he still have a functioning one, and family comp too. he doesn’t like the newer game consoles.”
“Funny version of Space Invader with the coronavirus ^^ I lost at Germany stage. A good thing would be display the score when you lose :) Good job in any case!”
I ended up implementing the part about the score, so no matter if you win or lose, the final score will display. In the beginning, you had to shoot a certain number of viruses that all had the same score value to progress to the next level, so it seemed pointless to me to even display the score at the end. In the last update, some viruses that were larger were worth more points, and you could exit a level with a greater variety of scores than before, so this made more sense. Also I think it looks a lot nicer and more professional that way.

“I wish it was mobile-friendly.”
I got this from numerous people, so I’m paraphrasing here. The reason I did not make it mobile-friendly was because I am still learning how to implement mobile controls, and I think it would be a lot better in portrait format rather than landscape, which I used because then it scales to full-screen on a PC monitor nicely. This would also means changing up every pattern of viruses, which would take a long time, as well as re-doing every single screen to fit in a different orientation of screen. I may do it eventually, but it will take some time.

What went wrong
Time, as usual. There is never enough of it. I submitted early on in the game jam with a month or so to go, which allowed me to keep updating for a while, but I still think more virus types and levels would have been good, as well as having time to respond to more feedback from players. 
One thing I had a very hard time with was the speed and complexity of each level. I started off with the idea of slower viruses, fewer outbreaks per level, and I feel like I had it start out so slowly a lot of players probably lost interest before it got the least bit challenging. I started off with only one enemy spawner, which would spawn one virus “outbreak” at a time (for example, 5 red viruses in a specific pattern), and then wait and spawn another. In the end, I added another spawner to the earlier levels, rather than only having multiple spawners in the later levels. Rather than having very slow viruses at the beginning, I sped up the viruses in early levels to almost the same speed at the last levels, I just had fewer enemies on-screen, and what I considered to be easier patterns of levels.

I would consider using a different color palette, but I still like the idea of retro, limited palettes considering I’m the only person working on this. I spend the most time doing the programming, and in the end, I don’t want to spend months/years doing the graphics. Also I’m not a big fan of modern or AAA games, so even if I had that capability, I wouldn’t do things like that. A lot of people think if you’re learning game programming, that’s your goal, you want to make or work on AAA games, and I think for a lot of people, that’s simply not true. A lot of people get into game programming because they want to make their own games with complete creative control, and not having to listen to anyone else, and not having to care what the current trends in gaming are. People often want to make games they want to play, or to make games telling stories they’ve written themselves. Obviously, this had little to no story, but it was nice as practice, I guess. I passionately hate modern and big-budget games, I haven’t even bought any recently. I don’t like the focus on quasi-photorealistic graphics. I don’t like how they all look and play the same, to a large degree, so I suppose getting into game development is also a sort of rebellion against that for me.