This past weekend was a blast! I knew from the start that I wanted to get a little bit out of my comfort zone, and I had been wanting to make *something* involving space ships of some kind. So I formed up a general concept that could have worked with most of the themes though it may have needed some tweaking here and there.

What came out of it was “Brobulon the Terrible.”

Play and rate it here.

I built it using Unity, but I made the entire thing sprite based with an orthographic camera and put the sprites on single planes. All the collision geometry was 3d (spheres and cubes) and I wrote a simple script to cycle through different sprites for animation.

What worked:
The movement system worked out pretty much how I wanted it, though maybe the ship could be a bit faster.
The pixel art seemed to convey what I was trying to do pretty well.
The rules of the game were simple enough that it let me make quite a few levels very quickly.
I used a transparent cutout unlit shader (built in to Unity) to draw all the sprites, and at least on my machine I get pretty solid framerates while there are ridiculous amounts of bullets on the screen.

What didn’t work:
I originally did a daytime sky that would have been featured in some levels. But it was too hard to see the targeting cursor and rather than spend more time making the cursor darker I just cut that background.
I spent an awful lot of time on pixel art (much more than I’d like to admit). I hadn’t done pixel art in years, but I was trying for it rather than doing anything in 3D because I figured it would save time.
The red and purple jets in particular fire more powerful shots and that’s not really conveyed well until you get hit by them (they use the same sprite as other enemy shots).
Tanks are too hard to hit. I gave them more health than the fighters because they should theoretically be easier to hit, being on the ground and slower. But since buildings get in the way they’re borderline invincible until you’ve cleared at least part of the level.

What I wanted to do (and what I’m going to do since I want to refine this project):
Bigger, scrolling levels. The idea being that when you reach one side of the level, you loop back around like you went around a planet.
Upgradeable stats (speed, shields, weapon power) between levels.
More varied buildings.
There was a warship sprite I made and actually imported into Unity, but I couldn’t figure out how to include it in the game in a way that would give me enough time to finish. The warship would have had at least four “turrets” to fire at the player with.
“Boss” events at different levels of Planetary Subjugation on each level, either being fleets of fighter jets or a warship to come in that you’d need to deal with.
A timer and a bonus awarded for how fast you cleared the stage.

I plan on working further on this, after a little relaxation and when time frees up a bit more.