D.S. MINER UPLOADED!

So first game ever.   I mean real game.  Menus, gfx, sounds, music, the whole bit.  

This was a great learning experience.  The code was put together with no real structure and I would hate to ever have to edit it for something now.  I had to find crazy workarounds for things that wouldn't have been necessary if I was just using the proper nodes and best practices to begin with.  There's definitely some more stuff I would have liked to add or edit, but at the time of this upload, the deadline is less than a day away.  The game runs and is stable-ish so that's good enough for me today.  There's a couple of bugs but I'm hoping the judges don't notice.  Especially since there's one doozy that happens once every few games.  But if i have time to update anything, I might.

Few things on my mind I wouldn't mind updating if I have the time later,  but the things working, so I may just call it good and use it as a launchpad for some other ideas.  Here's what's on my mind for it though.

I don't like that the player doesn't explode before the transition to the game over screen.  This, and a lot of other problems I had were because I had no idea I should make a Game Controller Node  to organize things.  By doing things like having the score on the player scene and destroy functions and such on each individual object, I made it very difficult to do even simple things like displaying the score at the end of the game.  Besides learning to structure a project properly for next time, what did I learn?  Thank God for singletons!  

The theme of this jam was "less is more"  so I wanted to reflect that in the art style.  It broke my heart to have gold colored pickups breaking up my black and white theme, but when they were black and white they were too hard to see.  Still might go back to them being solid white.

You'll notice some variance in the sound effects.  I purposely made the explosions and lasers very muted.  They happen so often that I didn't want to just beat people up with them.  I kept the coin pickup sound a little louder because if you time it right, it adds a little percussion to the music which I like.  

Sound is where I had to make the most sacrifice of my vision.  Again, keeping with the less is more, I wanted to vocalize every sound effect and even the music.  With the deadline approaching and not being near my recording station, I had to settle for assets I got in a humble bundle a few years ago.  I still kinda like the idea of me "pew pew-ing"  my way though the game so if I do update down the road, that'll be some torture you can look forward to.

Difficulty is another thing I wouldn't mind working on.  Right now, its a constant.   By changing timer properties, I could have spawned the asteroids a bit faster as things went on, which really would be all that's needed.  Again, probably take about 5 minutes if I had set things up right.  Now everything's an exercise in trial and error.

Finally, I wanted to add a little more flavor text.  There's not much of a story in the game, but it does exist.  You're a pilot, you escort a big mining ship, the mining ship blows everything up, you pick up the goodies.  You eventually die and the company makes all the money.  Originally I had the company send your family some token of appreciation, but it was all the sort of garbage your job gives you for stuff like having good attendance and whatnot.  Would have been some humor in it I think.  

I feel like there's fun to be had in this game.  After the jam, I may take some time and put some more effort in, but with the botches I did in the setup, I'd probably be better off just re-creating it and having all of those features in at launch. 

Anyway, thanks for taking the time if you read this.  Thanks even more if you took the time to play my game.  I have another jam coming up in a couple of weeks I'd like to make something for, so there's something to look forward to.   

Keep on playing, and as the man used to say, "take care of yourselves.. and each other"  

til next time.

Aerionix