HyperGate
“My first game project and #INDIESVSGAMERS entry! A classical space adventure paying homage to great Golden Age cabinet hits!
IT IS FINISHED! I’ve been researching games from the era I want to simulate and paying attention to the small details that give that arcade feel I want to achieve for this Game Jam’s theme.”
The first game jam I took seriously… It was mainly a challenge to myself to make a game in Unity. It’s purely 2D but it was my first project outside of GameMaker, and my first finished project, I guess.
The theme was “arcade” as I remember, so I went around reading up on the golden age of arcade games, researching on the big legends and how they came to be…
Of course this game isn’t anywhere close to a legend, but it took some inspiration from here and there. The objective was to clear the screen of baddies to then proceed to take down the boss. There were few bosses and the game would restart after the last one, but with a red UI and random meteors spawning from outside the play area. Hopefully that would make the game end sometime! Artificial difficulty via rng yay.
The little map thing is taken straight from Defender and I was marvelled at myself when I saw it working on the first implementation with no bugs. While I stuck it there on a whim in the end it let me make a bigger map without having the player feel lost without an objective.
The control scheme was taken from Asteroids obviously, not much else to say here… The game just took shape in my mind as I looked at all these old games so it’s kind of a frankestein’s monster.
The colourful bug enemies are a homage to Galaga, one of the first three videogames I ever played, on my father’s NES.
The bosses’ shooting patterns are danmaku reminiscent of certain Touhou boss patterns… I knew it doesn’t marry well with the difficult-to-minutely-control momentum-based asteroids scheme, but I didn’t have much time, and since it was a JAM based on people streaming these games I just thought danmaku would be flashy enough and the difficult controls might give raise to some funny plays. I thought.
Oh right! The way bosses are introduced when the stage starts is taken right from 1942 and 1943. I think the accuracy display and such at the end of the stages was from those games, or maybe something similar…
The little stage start jingle was also inspired from Galaga, and I also ended up making stage end and game over jingles based on it. Hazel, a great friend with a Naming Sense, made me a little boss fight theme to break up the silence of regular stages and add a bit of tension to the boss fight.
A fun little bug with this game was that I was calculating the enemies’ direction in the update() function instead of fixedUpdate()… which meant it got changed as fast as possible instead of a fixed ammount of times per second. Of course when I tried it on my slow, old desktop pc it seemed to work perfectly, but when I finally got someone else (with probably a more decent computer) to try and stream it, the enemies were spinning in place like crazy… Getting others to playtest your game is important!
I had some more ideas as I remember, things like having a boss rush as the final stage in each loop, having a very mangled lowpass voice shout “HyperGate!” together with a small cutscene between stages, small “secrets” like shooting enemies at specific times giving yo bonuses… In the end it’s not a very memorable game in itself, but it was my first finished product so it’s a nice memory in a way.