A Late Postmortem

This is adapted from a twitter thread I posted on this topic two months ago.

Originally, I intended for this game to be an overhead shooting experience. Something in the vein of Smash TV. As development pressed on, I realized it would probably be easier to make a regular  vertical shooter.  With this in mind, I approached development with a optimization mindset.

What do I mean by this? That means keeping down my Big O,  and making sure that the Sega Genesis doesn't have to work too hard to make this game work. I came up with a number of different time saving solutions that helped increase performance by wide margins. About 40-50% of the is original game code is dedicated to optimizing the shooting aspects.  However, in the last forty minutes of the jam, I realized that the game was still somewhat unplayable. Collision detection was very buggy, and when many things were on the screen, the game would slow to a crawl.

I made the decision to remove shooting altogether. All the shooting code was disabled and the code that handled missile and collision detection was also disabled, thus eliminating the slowdown. I also made a much simpler less buggy collision detection algorithm (opposed to a box-box collision system, this new system converts the current sprite location into an 8x8 tile, or a GIANT pixel.  Checking if two giant pixels share a location is much faster than box-box collision).

What remains is A pretty fun game about dodging stuff as opposed to dodging and shooting.  It's quite enjoyable and I'm still quite proud of it!  special thanks to

@RutgersCOGS  for hosting the event!!

@alteredimension  for writing the compiler. SECOND BASIC ROCKS!!!

Major Takeaways:

- WRITE MODULAR CODE!!!! ( When I code, I try to make it as modular as possible so that if something changes I can just tweak the engine and create something new, and that's really what saved this project)

- Focus on GAMEPLAY!!! (I spent 2 days on the music LOL)

- Make sure your test hardware works!! My flash cart broke and my hardware was rendered useless.