Ships Ahoy!
A nautical twist on the traditional arcade game Asteroids, Ships Ahoy! forces the player to race around the enemy ships not just to avoid destruction, but to collect treasure and up their score. If that wasn't hard enough, the player must shoot their cannons from the side of their ship, expecting mastery over navigation and aim separately.
Contributions
Systems Design
C# Programming
Pixel Art
Treasure
In order to make the game separate from an asteroids clone, the player needed incentive to move towards things rather than away. While you do still need to dodge the ships throughout the game, treasure chests ensured that the player couldn’t sit in the middle and simply rapid-fire in a circle. In order to get score, they had to go collect it. Even worse: they can destroy the chests if they shoot haphazardly! They can even be lost if other ships touch them. So hit fast! Just not too fast.
Side Shots
Adding challenge also came in the form of the way the player shoots. In a traditional game like this, the player can shoot forward and fly forward, meaning they are generally safe to rapid fire directly ahead and escape that way. In Ships Ahoy! the player has to make very deliberate movements to get treasure, avoid obstacles, and get into firing position. While frustrating at first, play testers picked it up very quickly and found it an interesting challenge.
Feedback
The game teaches the player everything they need to know with feedback alone. Disparaging whirrs sound when a chest is either destroyed or collected by enemy ships, letting the player know these are the same punishments, and that shooting the chest offers no reward. Likewise, the same positive ping and points indicators appear when collecting chests and shooting larger ships. The large ships themselves change color on damage, teaching the player they have extra health. All these little details help the game feel more fleshed-out.
Difficulty
Another way to force the player to move is that the ships are all homed in on the player’s location on creation. This means that there isn’t a clever corner the player can hide in and hope that nothing ever shows up. The ships also start to spawn more frequently, with an increasing buffer between each new spawn to prevent the screen from being overwhelmed in moments. More ships mean more ways to die, but more loot to earn.
Art
One element of game design is that I want the game to feel “mine.” Rather than finding free assets, I worked hard to make sure each piece of art and animation in the game was made personally. This helped to get a consistent look for the different objects, as well as give me the freedom to tweak them in ways that better suit the game. While it is fairly rudimentary, it helps the game to really pop!
