Magnetar - Global Game Jam 2022 - Day 3

Published Sunday, January 30, 2022

And with that, the jam is over, and my game is complete! It's got a full gameplay loop and everything! You can download it from itch.io from the widget below or from the Global Game Jam site or the GitHub repository using the links at the bottom of this post.

As you'd expect, the final day was spent on game polish, such as being able to win and lose, or having a final boss. Wait, no, that's important stuff!

Okay, so day 2 didn't go too great, and it was a mad dash to get everything finished. Definitely don't think too hard about how the final boss is just a cube that's been extruded a bit and told to shoot a lot of bullets. Or how the game is way too easy, except when the stars align and you're completely swamped with bullets. Even so, I'm pretty proud of the end result. There's a full gameplay loop, with win and lose states, and even a two player mode! I also actually did put a ton of polish in places when I should have been fixing the core mechanics. For example, the main menu. I've very proud of that. The animation, the sound design, the unnecessary nature of it. Wonderful.

The command ship. — The very beautiful ‘Command Ship’, or final boss. Each of the large square ports regularly spawns common enemies, while the two blue prongs shoot a rapid stream of alternating polarity bullets. Ignore the design outside of that, I had an hour and a half to model, program and configure this and I just went ham with the extrude tool.

In addition. while there's no soundtrack, every important action does have a sound effect. Sure, they may not be mastered very well, but it's there and it helps a lot with the game feel. And there's the background asteroids, something I nabbed quickly from another shelved project of mine, Elysian Fields. I mean, I could have very easily potato-ified a sphere in Blender, but I already had some lying around and any minute saved was worth it. With them there, there definitely helped a lot with adding depth to the scene, and showed that you were actually moving through space (Something that wasn't best conveyed with just the skybox, where you could have just as easily said you were spinning around in place).

Honestly though, even though my game isn't the most unique or special, it's nice to do a game jam after so long, and finish a game that isn't just a horrible buggy mess! This definitely isn't my last jam, by a long shot.

The Global Game Jam page for Magnetar can be found here.

The GitHub repository for Magnetar can be found here.

An in-game screenshot of Magnetar. — An example of gameplay. Each of the glowing dots is a bullet - the white ones are the player's, while the red ones are positively charged and the blue ones negatively charged. The player's ship is currently negatively charged, as shown by the blue trails and the UI, meaning the blue bullets will be repelled, but the red ones attracted. Moments after this screenshot, the player was hit with a large number of bullets.