Don't Shoot My Spaceship

This is the big one, ladies and gentlemen. During the making of all these following games, I went back and forth with this game. It began as a simple beginner project and now it is becoming my masterpiece. This game has it all, its own server engine, game engine and space engine. Manually crafted objects, behaviors, scenarios and events. It is a rpg-action-space-shooter, where you are a spaceship that can turn the world 360 degrees to dodge all kinds of enemies and obstacles, while doing quests, escorting damsels and flying through asteroid belts. All my knowledge and skills are interwoven within this game. It is not done, and it may never will be, but it brought me to this place of coding enlightenment and that can only be positive.

First Steps in Developing Games

To create simple 2D games, I used the LibGDX library. This made it easier to render, debug, use physics and create maps and so much more. By using Java in Intellij I was up and running, and I was finally creating games.

Logic Is My Best Friend

The Return Of Break-Out

I began making a game engine so that I could use it in future games I might want to make. And for me to test my engine I made a break-out game. Simple blocks, that can be broken with a ball, that you need to bounce back with a paddle.

GitHub Project

Big Ball Bonanza

I could not focus on just one idea, now that I had my own game engine so I put them all together, which made the game very hard to play. That did not matter to me, because I made another step in coding evolution. It was time to make something special.

GitHub Project

Conquering the 2D World

Sword Fight!

This game went throught a couple of iterations, but I finally ended up with this fun sword fighting game. You pick a player, and start the game. Try do dodge the other men with swords and try to push yours up against their head. It gets harder and harder as you go.... uhmm....the game gets harder and harder as you go. The point is, I looked better, it played better, it was overall better than my other games.

With my own Game Engine and a bag of ideas, I looked for tools to help me some more. LibGDX brought me by Ashley: A Java entity system inspired by Ash & Artemis. With this I could create more elaborate objects and I could maintain a more realistic physics system.

GitHub Project

Into another dimension

The Reflex

Unity has been mentioned by people who knew I was making games. So I began making a small game in Unity. I got introduced to Visual Studio for the first time, as well as C#. It went smooth. I had confidence in myself and with that I picked it up within a day. I surprised myself and made this game within a couple of days maybe. It isn't a big game and not very creative, but it is the next step in my development as a developer.

GitHub Project

Horde!

Unity worked out well, so I wanted to make a FPS game. A mini game, where I could test my coding skills to make a shooter. This took some time to figure out. The hard code was easily done, but the animations and the physics in a 3D world were a headache sometimes. But in the end, I could walk and jump. I could shoot zombies that spawned on different parts of the map. I even made bunnies hop all over the place.... because why not?

GitHub Project

The Front End Adventure

Rock-Paper-Scissors

Like in all the previous steps, also in web development, I began by making a small game. To see what is possible and to quickly have something tangible. Logic is less important in web development, if you don't use javascript. And with that I had another road to travel...the javascript road.

Play

The Solar System

While diving into Javascript, I began seeing the power of what you could do with certain libraries within html. For instance, here I used the p5 library and processing. And before I knew it, I had created something to stare at.

Take a look

Inspire and get inspired

Don't Shoot Back

Now that I have some experience with Javascript, I entered a game jam. I wanted to really intensify my javascript training, so I decided to join js13kGames 2019: within a month, build a html/javascript game from scratch, with no external libraries and it has to be less than 13kb zipped. So I build a tiny version of Don't Shoot My Spaceship. While building my own game, I saw so many talented coders, that had the same restrictions as me, but created the most elaborate games. This inspired me to go harder, to get better, and to do it faster!

GitHub Project Play it here js13kGames Entry