Planetary Rush Post-Mortem

I entered "Planetary Rush" into the 24th Mini Jam. It was created in just under 72 hours using the Godot game engine.

I've always wanted to do a game like GalCon, but with line-drawing control, so you can better direct your ships. That way, you can intercept attacks en-route with careful flanking attacks.

My goal for this game jam was to learn techniques in Godot for drawing paths and having units follow those paths. I'm pretty happy with the result. Pathing is pretty easy in Godot 3.1, with built-in nodes for Path2D and PathFollow2D. I just had to write a little flocking code so the ships didn't pile up on top of each other.

My units follow a target which moves along the path. The target needs to move a little faster than the units, so they don't act squirrely. Meanwhile, they try to avoid colliding with each other.

The timeframe for this jam was pretty short, so I didn't put a lot of polish and game-feel into the game. There's still a ton of bugs and general slow-downs when the map is filled with paths, units, lasers.

If I had more time I would have recoded the attack system. Ships firing projectiles works pretty well for a shootemup game, but not so well for an RTS.  Immediate "Hitscan" attacks would have been more effective and caused less slowdown.

I might still recode some of the systems in Planetary Rush, but my backlog of "jam-games to finish" is getting bigger all the time. Soon I'll have to pick a game and develop it for market.

If I develop this game further, I'll probably want to add a few different types of units, some new factions with their own benefits, much better AI, and more control over the game_speed.