Nebulords Global Multiplayer Game Jam Postmortem

This game was a ton of fun to make in the little spare time I had over the course of 30 days. The idea started when I had a conversation with my friend about the game jam. We are both huge fan of Atari 2600 games thought it would be cool to combine two of our favorite games from the console: Asteroids and Warlords. So, I took the space movement of and screen wrapping of Asteroids and combined it with the paddle and ball Breaktout-style gameplay of Warlords. I made the initial prototype during the first weekend of the Jam and the results turned out super fun! It took the rest of the 27 days (off and on) to do the animations and polish.  In the beginning, I had screen wrapping on the player ships in addition to the ball closer to Asteroids, but after playtesting, it felt more fun to contain the player ships in the arena and only allow the ball to escape and screen wrap. This created fun moments for fake-outs and trick shots.

With the exception of the music, I made everything from scratch and I think I was able to accomplish a decent level of polish for a game jam game. As an artist/animator, it was a blast to make the art. I was going for a retro-futuristic style similar to Geometry Wars, but I did not want to be limited to vectors and I implemented glitchy effects in addition to glowy neon color. I created all of the art, animations, and effects in After Effects.

However, development was not exactly smooth sailing. There are still a few bugs and the aim of this game jam was to implement online multiplayer which I tried and failed miserably at. I'm allergic to programming and I quickly found that online multiplayer was way over my head, so I opted to make an offline multiplayer game instead. I developed the game in Construct 2, which is my engine of choice for 2D prototypes because I can whip up ideas really fast, but it's certainly dated and not the best for implementing more advanced features like online multiplayer. If I continue development, I'll probably switch to Unity.

For the "reconnect" theme, the player needs to connect their paddle with the ball in order to attack, so there is a risk/reward factor in trying to retrieve the ball.  I had some additional game mechanic ideas for the theme, but I didn't have time to implement them. For example, when a player got eliminated, they would get sent to the corner of the arena and would have a chance to swap places with another player, or "reconnect", if they got a successful elimination from a ball launch.

Many thanks to my awesome wife who helped me playtest and helped design the UI. I would love to work on this game further and even aim towards a Steam release with AI and possibly online multiplayer.