So now that y'all played it, and I'm proud of lots of little bits in it, here's my post-mortem on things specifically that I'd like to fix if I made a Championship Edition remake later on when I have more experience:
Title Screen:-Sucks, but until I learn how to draw larger art my choices are to go do some photography and edit the photos into something I can use in a title screen/game over screen, learn some vector art skills, or commission artists for a few art pieces I can use for game over/win/title, etc....one of the very few benefits of starting getting into this at 40 instead of as a teen/college kid, is I got some $$ so I don't mind putting a couple hundred bucks into stuff here and there to improve the game.
Intro text: -Fine
Stage 1: -As mentioned the collision is a disaster
-The level scale isn't great. Player needs to be smaller or moveable area needs to be bigger. Too tight. Flames/Bats/Player need consistency in sizing (a little hard when original pixel art is all at differing sizes, I should try next game to make all sprites the same pixel size to be more consistent)
-The background tile looks horrible parallax scrolling kind of effect in windowed, looks ok fullscreen. Just need a different background.
-The art up top is awful and super low-res blurry. I tried making a "room" initially with like a wall and a fireplace at the top but it doesn't match with top-down for the rest. Should just ditch it and have wall tiles only and a better wooden floor background.
-If I made a public release remake, I'd make multiple stages in this style of increasingly larger and more complex mazes with more traps than just a flame that goes back and forth. Probably like 3-5 stages and this would be "world 1"
Stage 1->2 transition text:-THE MOUSE CURSOR HAUNTS THE REST OF THE GAME even though no scenes have mouse aiming after the first scene!! If you start the build after any scene past the first scene there is no cursor in any scene. This upset me greatly and I could not figure out what was causing it or how to turn it off.
Stage 2:-Is alright, make the 2d planets/rocks and stuff a bit smaller and less blown up pixelated. Have more waves of enemies with a few different enemy types (the skulls actually have like 3 different enemy types that do different types of attacks but I just used the same sprite on all of them).
-I had trouble making this scrolling stage work in terms of enemies either die too quickly or if they have more life by the time you kill one you're behind on the next ones that are scrolling in your face and it gets overwhelming. I think maybe I need to slow down the scroll movement speed for the enemies and spread them further apart and give them more life.
-For the eye boss, I'd try to fill in the sprite with a bit more detail so it's not just an 16x16 sprite blown up so large. I'd also give it a lifebar.
-Like stage 1, if I did a public release I'd make 3-5 stages of different enemies and obstacles to dodge layouts and make it "world 2". I could have it like you pass by 2d earth at the start and as you go through the 3-5 stages you pass by 2d versions of each planet in order they exist in distance from earth so it feels like each stage you're getting further and further away from earth and towards the end of the solar system. For the final stage of it can have like a black hole you go into and then come out of and fight the "EYE OF THE UNIVERSE" boss in darkness in there.
Stage 2->3 transition-Fine, I kind of want to make my own spookier sound effect for when the eyes open.
Stage 3 intro-Fix the UI text replacement so it's the same speed both windowed and full-screen
-Would like to make spooky scary music for 10 seconds building to a crescendo at scene change
Stage part 1-In general with all my scene transitioning I have a bit of a hiccup in the music transitions that I need to work out. I tried putting the new music upon entering a stage on its own timer so it can wait a second or two or three before starting the stage music to transition more smoothly. Worked ok, but still room for improvement.
-Generally I like this stage! Was fun to make. The 3d planet dropping looks pretty ugly, but I spent like 3 hours getting those 3d planets to work and react to 2d bullets and the ship and didn't want to cut them. Also certain planets play a sound when they are falling on you but others don't. But they all have THE SAME AUDIO SOURCE with the same values and it makes no sense. Like the giant sun should sound REALLY LOUD and scary but it has like no sound at all... also stage could use more of a few seconds pause between dropping black holes and then dropping 3d planets. Was just too lazy to retime the motion speed of everything to make it better at that point.
-Speaking of sound I hate that Unity's audio source only has sound volume at 1 or below for audio. Lots of times my audio is too low at 1 and I don't know damn anything about how to throw that audio quickly into another program to increase volume and bring it back. And adjusting all the other audio in the level lower to compensate is too much work. I see this issue in a lot of games/programs. If volume slide is going to start at 1, then it better be able to go to 1.5 or 2. Otherwise end up dropping everything else to try to compensate and it's annoying.
-Stage 3 part 1 -> 2 BEAM SCENE transition-this was the last stage I made yesterday, had been wanting to put it in and was fun getting it working, scripting in the movement system to change movement based on an internal timer so you go from locked movement to free roam movement at the last second after being told you can move. Also put a timer on the health script for the giant bullet to explode at a certain time so you didn't have to sit and wait for it to slowly leave the screen after dodging it.
-The "here, have more life" dialogue is supposed to be directly under the lives but the scaling fucks it up on Itch in both window & fullscreen. The centered stuff was less of an issue, but could not get this in place.
-Also I think it's bad at communicating to people that they can move at the last second. It just says I'll help you move and players probably expect something to happen before than can move. I should put a timer ding sound effect maybe turn on a particle effect around the player at that moment to indicate they are now free to move and dodge the giant bullet.
-So because I put the stage transition on a timer, if you die and the game over screen pops up if you sit for a few seconds it'll still transition to the next scene. Whoops. I need to put an && gameOver != SetActive(true) in on that timer to avoid this.
-Also would like to do a scary music here that builds up to the moment the giant bullet is gonna hit.
-Oh, so I didn't have an easily available giant beam/bomb thing to drop and I couldn't use a planet because in the earlier stage planets were all killable and not impending doom scary enough, so I just super-larged a bullet. This is...ok, but not great. But even more so my explosion animation I created for it, while looking fine at smaller sizes looks pretty awful that big lol, would redo the explosion and maybe replace the giant pink bullet with something else.
Stage 3 - mid-stage-I like this stage a lot. Originally I didn't have the boss in the background and it was just on generic space. The boss in the background does make it too busy, but I think it conveys a good insanity effect of fighting giant space tentacles while a giant cosmic being's twirly eyes are spinning around in the background. This might actually be my favorite stage in the final version. Even the bullet patterns are set up in a way that it's fun weaving in between waves to get shots in. Tentacles need about 2x the health though and maybe health bars if I'm giving health bars to stuff in stage 2 in a later version.
-Death animation for tentacles isn't terrible, but it looks a little less pixely than I'd like (mostly used spray instead of pencil to spray red blood as I shrunk down the tentacle)
Stage 3 - final boss-Feels like a scene is missing. I think I did a good job on the boss consistency until this point. It's unknown, then eyes, then you start to see the tentacles come down and sit in place for a stage, then the body/face comes down and sits for the previous fight...but now the boss pops in and it's room sized and you can move around it? I feel like I need a scene where the boss shrinks down or the player ship due to the
magic friend gets bigger. I couldn't think of a scene I liked to do this (also haven't tried scaling things during game through scripts), but if I remade the game I'd add this scene in.
-The final boss needs a transition in, but what GreatSage suggested would probably cover this.
-I'm happy with the bullet patterns. They used to be a
little tighter and harder to weave between, but even after dozens of times I'd still game over at times so I think this is a game middleground. I can no-hit weaving through the patterns at this point usually. I think if the boss had about 1.5x HP and if you only had 3 lives instead of 6 it would be a really well-balanced boss fight. As is, it's a bit easy but pretty fun and I'm happy that I made a fun boss with some challenge and reward.
-I also like that I got to make the CAVE style pink bullets I wanted. I took them off a non-pink asset I had from a sprite pack that was just a single frame still and I re-colored it by hand pixel by pixel into a shades of pink version and made a 4 frame spinning animation and they look pretty good in game! Also I got the SUPER SLOWDOWN I wanted at one point when instead of using circle collider on the bullets I use polygonal and it make the complex colliders with a ton of vertexes and then with all the bullets being fired on screen it brought the game down to a crawl
Now I know if I want intentional slowdown just throw lots of vertexes on a 2d collider for bullets.
-Oh, and speaking of assets, the non-original sprites the game were the 2d planets, the 3d planet textures, the 2d asteroids in stage 2 and meteors and black holes in stage 3 part 1, the space background, stage 1 background and the stage 1 wall tiles and top area texture. I think all the rest is my own work, the flames came in an asset pack BUT I'm gonna take credit for them because they came as a 2-frame animation that looked so shit I had to use them with animation turned off so I spent some time and hand animated my own animation frames and now the flames look good so imma take credit for that one.
-Finally, if I did a remake, for this fight I'd change it so you'd dodge bullets for like 10 seconds then the bullet script would stop, then the boss would throw out a Zelda LTTP energy ball that you'd shoot back and the hit animation would be 1-2 tentacles die and are no longer on the boss so you know you're doing damage and making progress (no lifebar for the boss). Then 10 seconds of bullets with 1st tentacle shooter added on, then another energy ball fight, then repeat with 2nd tentacle shooter, etc... If I don't end up using the 3d planets in Stage 3 - first phase, I think it'd be fun if the energy balls were actually the boss throwing planets at you one planet at a time and you shoot them back into the boss and a tentacle explodes. Final one could be the sun and the boss burns up or something.
Final Boss death scene
-I hate it. It's fast and choppy and small and is lacking any sound effects. I'd really like to redo this proper but animating that boss was such a long endeavor because it's a big multi-part sprite with a lot of moving pieces, that smoothing it out would take a while and getting the right SFX too. If I did a remake for a public release I would 100% replace this scene with something more consistent looking.
-Also I think I did it wrong with making the animation in animator combining the eye guy and boss as one flat animation. Would have been better to have a gameobject of the flying eye boss that comes in then have some particle effects beam out from its eyes and then have a separate death animation that looks solid for the boss and the move the flying eye boss off screen. But this is all just a learning experience.
Ending credits:-Actually this was the final scene I made last night. I was gonna make an additional song and my musician buddy was supposed to make me a short 60 second song, but he didn't get around to it and I was sick of the game and wanted it done so I just used stage 2 music which actually worked fine.
-Making the credit scene was a lot of fun. I like the idea of having the enemies pop in and be jolly as credits appear.
-Still has the text size mis-match between windowed and fullscreen. I mean this is a big fucking difference:
I think that's most of my thoughts on the process. Was fun! Learned a lot! Have some basic background now for my next game which unfortunately is a 2d platformer and I don't have a lot of interest or interesting ideas for a platformer as it's not one of my favorite genres. But as I take the class and learn what I can do (including learning how to appropriately do tilemaps) I'm sure ideas will pop into my head.
Also if I did do the remake of this one and added in the additional world 1 stages and world 2 stages while doing the few cleanups on world 3 I'd imagine the game length would go from like 5 mins -> 20-30 mins which would be a good size to release on Itch to the public.