Space Gate Ultra
January 2019 - April 2019
Space Gate Ultra is the product of a semester long solo project in Unity. All assets used (including scripts) were either created by me or copyright-free. It is a top-down bullet-hell-esque arcade-like game where you primarily destroy enemies by ramming into them. This project was my first foray into implementing progression systems into digital games as well as being my first digital solo project.
What I Learned
Like I said, this was first attempt at creating a progression system in one of my game projects, to rather disappointing results. However, I learned a lot from the attempt. The biggest foundational issue with how I went about progression was trying to introduce entire new mechanics instead of improving the base mechanics. This was way over-scoped for the size of the project, and was never able to get them the way I wanted. For example, there are portals in my game as objects in the level. Play-testers really liked going through the portals, because it would slow time and give the player a huge speed boost. I thought "Surely if players like portals in the environment, they would love being able to place them themselves." So I went ahead and programmed a... Portal Gun (sorry Valve) that would fire portals in two directions, making it easy to immediately go into a portal after firing. Very few playtesters ever bothered to even fire the portal gun after getting it. The reason? It totally flew in the face of everything the game taught to that point (fast, reckless behavior) and rewarded more careful planning and patience. While I thought this was appealing to different playstyles, all it did was confuse players (who would then ignore it). What I should have done is introduce another bonus for going through portals, like a shock wave that appears at each portal and damages enemies. Instead of trying to get players to use a new mechanic, I should have rewarded them for using the mechanics that are available from the start of the game.