Release!

After 3 months of mostly night / weekend work and no single dedicated artist, this is finally out the door.  Not my first game industry project by far, but my first indie game.  

The biggest challenge for this whole thing was the art -- I can program, I can write, I can't draw, and I can't afford $30-50 an hour for a dedicated professional.  I did make the saucer chassis and the starfield in the "Cosmic Ark" game over screen, but that's about it.  Luckily, I won an environment suggestion contest on Luis Zuno's Patreon page, and that kicked off this whole thing.  He did the environment, the music, and a couple of the ships.  The rest I had to scrounge up from OpenGameArt (contributors noted in the credits window).  Could I have made this more of a 2.5D game in line with the kind of things the Intellivision Amico is going to have?  Sure -- if I'd had the art resources.  All things considered, though, I'm happy with the style that came to be here, as patchwork as some of it is. 

The other biggest challenge was that this game was, during my first series of playtests, easy as hell.  I studied the Intellivision version immensely to see what the difference in mechanics and timing was, and all I could come up with was the awkwardness of the old controls. Since making controls deliberately awkward isn't exactly best game design practice, I had to do a couple of things:  reduce the maximum number of on-screen shots to one (you can buy more if you save up crystals), give some of the later ships (day 3 and onward) dodging abilities, and give the easy-to-hit "Cosmic Crawler" riff the splintering feature upon destruction, adding just a dash of the old Missile Command mechanics to that one ship.  With that combination of factors, the game is actually a game, and not just a pretty reminiscence.