Robot Frenzy was made for the GoedWare Game Jam #7. The theme was Alternate reality/Time is power.

It wasn’t easy to think of a game idea at the start. But after a long process of brainstorming ideas, I decided that I will make a game where robots are taking over. What better way to make it than a top-down shooter where you destroy robots.

I started off with making the player. I made the sprite then added some basic top-down movement and shooting.

I then made the enemies. Made the sprites in Gimp and made them follow the player and attack him. 

I didn’t know if I should make the game level based or make it so the enemies spawn randomly and you play for the high score. The initial plan was that the game will have levels, but after seeing that it would be boring and too easy, I made it high score based.

Now I had the game concept finished, but it wasn’t really fun.

I watched some videos on game feel and juice and after learning more about it I managed to drastically improve my game.

Before:

After:

To achieve this, I added the following:

• Screen shake

I took a random Vector2 between – and + amplitude (which I set to 8 by default) and changed the camera offset to that Vector2.

• Camera lean

I made the camera lean towards the mouse so the player camera would feel more responsive. I did this by changing the cameras position to the half of the distance between the player and the mouse. 

• Vignette effect

I made the corners of the screen darker than the center using this shader in Godot.

• Aimer

Changed the mouse cursor to this sprite I made.

•  Gun knockback and muzzle flash

Every time the player shoots the gun x scale will slightly change to make it look like it is going back. Also, there will be an animation played using a muzzle flash sprite.

• Enemy flash white

     I made the enemies flash white when they are hit. I did this using a Godot shader.

• Explosions

When the bullet hits something or the enemy dies there will be an explosion. I made this by making the explosion sprites with Gimp.

Next, I had to implement the “Time is power” mechanic. I had a lot of ideas but not much time to make them into a reality. I thought about changing the players weapon to a stronger one every 60 seconds. But the problem was I had no time to make new weapons. At the end I settled with a special attack when the power bar fills. It fills every 50 seconds and when it does a sound effect is played and the bar becomes brighter. I made this so the player would know that the attack is ready. Then you can press SPACE and a huge bullet will be fired.

I then started working on the game music. I was using LMMS. I was trying to make some sort of battle music. After educating myself about it I successfully made an action song.

I added an options menu where you can change the master, music and SFX volumes.

One problem that I had was that the enemies would spawn all over the screen, which made the game unplayable because they could spawn on the player. I solved this by getting random numbers outside of an imaginary rectangle on the screen. And if the number was in the rectangle, then it would repeat the process using a while loop until the random number was outside the rectangle.

To finish it off, I added functions to save the high score and the options the player selects. With that I finished the game, made the cover in Gimp and published it. I hope everyone likes it!