Juno Hunter : Prologue post-mortem and March game announcement

Note to self : don’t pick the shortest month of the year - when you’re away for a week and a half - to get ambitious with your game design…

So yeah, the original plan was to have something more or less based on Spy Hunter, with the driving and the shooting and the chasing enemy vehicles, only with a Juno First style take on 3D perspective. That didn’t quite happen but I’m pretty pleased with the eventual result anyway. In the end, the eventual game came together pretty quickly in terms of actual development time. I had a prototype [link to game announcement post] up and running in the first week or so which I think led me to get a bit overconfident and start slacking off. Combine that with a week’s holiday - which ended up eating more like 3 weeks worth of dev time between getting ready to go and being generally wiped out and in need of some downtime when I got back - and there wasn’t much in the way of noticeable progress between there and the final weekend.

I thought about bailing on February and going for a March release instead but ultimately figured half the point of this exercise is forcing myself to hit deadlines. If I start letting things slide I’ll end up with Droidy Shooty Thing and Gun Bastard all over again and the next thing you know it’ll be December and I’ll only have one game to show for it. I’m not having that.

So, I sucked it up and planned on just polishing things to the point where I could reasonably call it finished - title screen, menus, scoring and some kind of endgame situation. This left me on Sunday afternoon sitting on a technically complete but not very fun game.

At this point I kind of panicked and started hacking at the game code in an attempt to add a bit more life to it, fixed up the traffic generation to add more cars to dodge, added the speed boost feature, and suddenly I had a game.

So what’s next?

Lagertron : Survival

Yep - after the frankly mental pace of February I thought something a bit more relaxed would be in order, so I’m picking up an idea I’ve had kicking around for a while now. I’m really pleased with Lagertron, and it’s keeping up a steady trickle of occasional sales, but it’s hardly set the world on fire in terms of numbers. I figure a large part of that is just general reluctance to part with cash up front for some no-name developer’s silly beer game.

Enter Lagertron : Survival - a free to play version based on a survival mode against endless spawning waves of enemies, with a metagame based on collecting Beer Tokens to buy enhancements and power ups (complete with the evil exploitative IAP that all the kids love these days). I figure that’ll work in two ways - it means I can release a free version that’ll attract more downloads and maybe drive interest in the paid version since it’s different enough not to cannibalise sales,, and also hopefully become obscenely wealthy through the sale of pretend currency as is the style these days :)

In terms of coding, tweaking Lagertron to add the survival mode shouldn’t be a massive job, which should leave me plenty of time to spend swearing Android’s IAP system.

Tonight though, it’s time for beer and steak and twatting more skeletons with a big axe - I’ve got a new one now that sets things on fire :D