SpaceWar
Overview
SpaceWar is a genre-blending game that takes the player through a series of gameplay shifts, each representing a new stage in the story. It begins as a side-scrolling adventure where you talk to NPCs to uncover that a war is breaking out in space, motivated to help, the player transitions into a top-down sequence, assisting an engineer in repairing a spaceship.
Once airborne, the game shifts into a side-scrolling beat 'em up where you move vertically across the screen, taking down enemy ships. After the battle, the player returns home and explores their house in a point-and-click style, only to discover the fight isn’t over yet, the final showdown takes place in a top-down, arcade-style boss battle inspired by classic Space Invaders gameplay.
Project Analysis
Since this was my first ever project, I don’t think I stood out in any particular area. Design-wise, the game is fairly simple, but I was able to accomplish everything I set out to do, the narrative and gameplay flow feel a bit awkward, but that’s to be expected for a first attempt, and I learned a lot about how to improve those aspects moving forward.
On the programming side, we faced some setbacks. The team member originally responsible for programming the game wasn’t able to follow through, so I had to take over those tasks close to the deadline, (ironically, this was the same programmer who would later join us again for Pilgrim’s Path, but I didn’t see the foreshadowing at the time), so the game ended up unpolished and contains a few bugs. While it’s fully playable, there are occasional issues that can temporarily soft-lock the player or interrupt key feedback moments, but learning how to program in GB Studio was a fun and valuable experience, it’s a simple and accessible tool that helped me bring a complete game to life for the first time. With more time to investigate the bugs, I believe many of those problems could have been resolved.
Roles
General Game Designer
Design manager
Level designer
Systems designer
Narrative designer
Content designer
User Researcher
General Quality Assurance
Game tester
Usability Researcher
Project Manager
Other contributions
Game Programmer
Information form
Team experience:
None
Team size:
Team - 3
Development budget:
0€
Development Time:
~1 month
Year of release:
2022