Week 9 - Level-Up Showcase

Last week my team, Phoenix Development Studios, went to level up to show off our game The Next Dimension, a bullet-hell shooter inspired by Geometry Wars.

We decided we'd be getting our game ready for Level-Up around 3 weeks before we got approval from our Game Development Workshop Professor, Ken Finney. We buckled down and started getting our game ready to show off.

Most of the 3 weeks were spent cleaning up code, implementing keymapping and controller support, optimizing the game, and implementing some redesigns. But the one of the most significant changes we made, at the last minute with just one line of code (yes, just one line of code, it is true...sort of), was the addition of a special background in our game's level select.

This addition to our game really increased its eye-catchiness. It also added to the affect that this was a sci-fi fantasy themed shooter.

After our game was approved by Professor Finney, we made on second change that completely changed the aesthetic of our game, and that was the inclusion of one new particle system that made it look as though explosion particles were warping together and flow towards the player.

When we got to level up, our main concern was that we wouldn't have a TV monitor to show off our game. Playing on a PC screen is fine, but when you want to grab peoples attention especially from a distance and within a sea of other people's awesome games, a small monitor doesn't exactly help. But luckily we were guaranteed one and we set up and all was fine...except some stupid errors in the release build of our game concerning optimization, which has since been fixed, but that meant we had to run the debug executable which is slightly slower than the current release build so it wasn't exactly a big deal.

Before the event started we had some students coming around asking us how we did the psychedelic background, and they were surprised to find out it was just one line of code (sort of). Once the event actually started, our visuals really caught the attention of those attending the event and we got more attention than we expected and many people enjoyed our game. We got a lot of feedback and some criticisms, some we already had planned for since we knew the limitations of our game, but mostly people just loved the aesthetic of the game, and the smooth controls.

By the end of the day though, my legs felt like they were going to fall off, but it was definitely worth it. Getting the opportunity to see other student's games from other schools was interesting, and I hope my team and I get the opportunity to go next year.