Post-Jam update(s?), game design overview, and what's to come

Thank you all for your interest in Shrimp 'em up! The version that was submitted to the Pixel Game Jam is just a small glimpse of what I had in mind, and there's a lot more I wish to add to the game, but before I mention future plans, I want to mention a few things that will happen as soon as the jam is over.

There will be a post-jam hotfix that fixes one issue current issue with the difficulty in which the game would get harder for every pan use instead of for each unique food made (more on the game's difficulty design later). I will also be working on a main menu, a proper tutorial and sounds/music in a future, bigger update, so please follow the game (or me on itch ig, I don't know how this site works too well) or follow me on twitter instead (@ordi_cat) for future updates. I'm personally handing everything myself, so it might take a long while to come out.

Although I'm not one to cover the inner workings of my own game, it's in the spirit of arcade games to make its systems quite elusive and I aimed to make my game the same, but I'm not sure if people will truly see the full extent of the design of the game after having only played it once there is a lot of stuff that is not seen to the player behind the scenes. I wish to talk about it a bit here so that maybe people who enjoyed the demo could have a bit more appreciation for its design.

If you've played through the game more than once, especially if you wanted to try and beat your previous score, you might find out that some enemies aren't what they were previously, or they seemed to have done different things. That is intentional! Alike a lot of modern shoot 'em ups, there is a hidden value in the game (people like to call it rank in the shmup community) that keeps track of your skill level through certain triggers, and in my game's case, it increases each time unique food is cooked (but like I mentioned earlier, I forgot an if statement and made it apply every time you used the pan. whoops). If you use the pan frequently, it will boost up the score multiplier, but certain enemies will become much more brutal to compensate.

There's no life system in the game, or at least this gamemode in the demo because of a few reasons.

1. It's a timed game and having the game end prematurely due to bad performance is kinda dumb in my vision.
2. There's a better way to punish the player other than a life/health number going down.

...and in my game's case, your food that you have cooked recently will spoil every time you take damage. 20% of your food's value will go down with each hit, up to 80% when it's fully spoiled, which isn't too good for scoring, but for people who simply wish to breeze through the game it doesn't really affect their experience much other than having their pride hurt a little by getting shot. It's mostly a punishment for people who wish to take the game's scoring system to its limits.

Speaking of death in-game, I wanted to add power-ups to make the player feel more powerful as they went on, but it conflicted with my game philosophy. I want players to shrug off getting hit and to keep playing, not to give up after losing all their power-ups and feeling weak again after restarting with no hope of catching up to the game (also known as the power-up syndrome to shoot em up veterans). Simply giving the player a powerful weapon from the get-go in which doesn't reset upon death makes it easy to jump back in after respawning since you can just continue what you were trying to do before. It makes for more fluid and rapid paced gameplay.

That's enough about the game's design for now. I might talk more about it on a later date, but now I wish to discuss the future plans for the game.

• Music and sound effects will be added to the game. I'll try to compose all the music and maybe some sound effects myself, so it might sound a bit crude.
• A proper tutorial will be added to the game, showing the player how to dodge and cook food for survival and score. (or skip this tutorial and face my wrath)
• A main menu for the game, where our shrimp chef protagonist tends to their customers in a small food stand near the shore, where he can take on certain requests for specific foods or goals.

I have some ideas for further into the future, like a more traditional shoot em up gamemode with lives and different weapons for the shrimp to carry, but that will reveal itself if the opportunity to continue development of the game shows itself and when the time arrives. For now, I'm glad that the basis of the game works, the game mechanics work as intended, the flow of the game is smooth and the gameplay is fun.

Thank you all for your kind words in the submission comments! They've encouraged me to keep working on my project further and helped rid of any doubt I had when I released the demo. I'm taking a short break from developing the game at the moment but I will try and work on composing the music and making the tutorial as soon as I'm done with my break.