So we just finished the game, and I got it all built and put on the project page. Big sigh of relief. I haven’t finished a game since Packet Racket (please don’t look it up) and I am stoked about the result of this one! The rest of the team is so excited to present what we’ve been working on for six days now.

In the Beginning

We’re a group of strangers. Really. We met on the Godot Discord server when I posted that I was looking for Linux users seeking to make games, and these two fellas, and only these two fellas, showed up at my doorstep, keyboards in hand. DimX suggested we start with a game jam, to get used to our workflows, and I was skeptical of the thought, but I was fine with the challenge. We chose the one week game jam two days before it started, and we just wondered what the topic was going to be.

On the day of the jam, the topic was revealed as “tennis” and… we weren’t super excited about it. It’s a little sporty and niche. There’s not a lot of fun to be had with an actual tennis game. So we brainstormed.

We made the project without any clear goal in mind, and got started spitballing ideas and implementing the basics: movement, projectiles, and the collisions. I’m really grateful for Ayman’s useful ideas. Without him, this game would look totally different, and be much more hectic and unbalanced.

Once we got the creative ball rolling, most of what we had left to do was program it.

In the Process

I spent a few hours every day programming some new features on the game, and battling the bowl of spaghetti the codebase was becoming. Ayman worked several hours a day designing the vectors for the first two characters and other graphics. After about day two, he got bored of the art and wanted to help with programming, so things sped up there. DimX wasn’t super communicative about his work, but the sound and music files would just appear about every day. One for shields, one for asteroids appearing, one for firing a missile.

Ayman would program one side of the game, while I programmed the other. I spent most of my time on the player controllers, AI, and menus. He spent his time working on asteroids, the health and energy bars, collisions, and other things. He also seemed to assemble every sound file into a functional part of the game, autonomously. I never even touched sound in the game, he did it all fantastically, and thanks to DimX’s work.

Finishing the Game

This is the hardest part of game development, in my experience. I sometimes bite off more than I can chew with a game, and the road to finishing becomes like miles. But part of the design of a game is choosing how long you want the road to be. Finishing the game, is the second piece to that puzzle. We decided to simply not implement other missiles, sound and music controls (them being non-functional is actually a bug), and other miscellaneous items.

The group guidance is very productive. We made all decisions mostly together. Actually, DimX would be at work or be offline and Ayman and I would be designing the game. DimX could come back and provide his feedback on the game’s features and design. He didn’t feel excluded, and provided great assistance as a lab rat when he would clone the game from GitHub and try out all the things we changed. :)

I don’t know if any of us will work together again, but this has been the most productive team I have been a part of, and I know each of them are bound for great things. Games give us all a creative medium to smile about, to commit a part of ourselves to. I smiled playing our game, and just barely surviving the onslaught of the AI. I think you might smile too.

Try our game, the v1.0 builds are below.

Let us know if we did something right. Thank you!