Post Project Thoughts

Total development time was around 19 hours if you include time saved by copying code I already had from my past projects.  I've now spent another 3 hours publishing the game, releasing the source code, and creating this project page.

There isn't a good reason for using a sprite sheet for some objects in the game and not using it for other objects.  And there isn't good reason for having a separate sprite sheet for the enemy ships - if the enemy ships were animated and had multiple frames then perhaps it would make sense.  So at this point in development the reason is "I did whatever was easy at the time" and for sustainable future development some effort should be made to put all of the items onto a single sprite sheet.  It could also made sense to have two sprite sheets, one for normal resolution and one for double resolution, to take advantage of Corona's scaling abilities, but the source graphics for many objects from Kenney are only available at normal resolution.

I wanted to move the high scores into the sqlite database, but ran out of development time.  It works fine as-is, but it's a little strange to have some of the game data in a database and other game data in a JSON file.

The tilt-to-move device control might work better if your finger didn't need to be on the screen for firing.  So perhaps auto-fire instead of tap-to-fire would be an improvement, however some more testing around the amount of energy consumed per shot would then need to be done.  Right now the desktop controls still feel more accurate.

There are a ton of additional game mechanics that could be implemented: power-ups, more interesting enemy AI, different weapons, level progress, enemy waves, boss fights... really the list is quite long, but for the game jam the game just needs to be released.

I made the game available as a free download for OS X, and will publish it to the app stores soon, so that anyone who wants to try out the finished project can do so easily.  I have also published the source code on GitHub so anyone can download and modify the code and hopefully learn from it.