New! Release of Mars Defense Force

Introducing the best Mars-based shoot-em-asteroids-up released on the 19th of April 2024 you will ever play.

Mars Defense Force is a small 2 week project i created to.. well get something out haha (among other things that I'll mention).

It began as a block blast game however while looking online I noticed that there are endless amounts of those games, for good reason as they are fun! However I wanted to create something different and stands alone, after some thought and some tests I came up with the idea... Earth Defense Force! after some thought about the art I then changed it to Mars Defense Force so that I could just have a blank red circle as the planet. I guess it could have been blue for earth but I felt like this looked cooler.

When starting this project I decided that 2 weeks was my hard exit, I would release whatever I had at the end of the 2 weeks - no matter what had been created. Ultimately having that hard deadline helped me keep ideas in scope. For example, an idea I had was for population to play a role in locking off certain upgrades, reach a certain population milestone and you would be able to unlock a new upgrade, this was to tie into a larger inter-play upgrade system that would allow you to begin levels with upgrades active. However I realised before creating this system that it would use up a lot of the development time. Revaluating I decided this wasn't the best route but population was already in the game along with colony ships so.. population needed to be used somehow. This is where I realised making population the kind of 'high-score' would be the easiest solution. I think in the final product this works to a degree however my slip up in how I planned that part of the design has left that area of the game feeling... weak. At least I feel. If I were to redo this or spend more time on it I'd try to make a higher population have more weight, either through graphical changes or rewards.

With the design I tried to capture a few things; one was clicker games. The population ticking up as colony ships arrive and increasing per second based on your choices in the game were inspired by clicker game design. Another inspiration was block blast games as I mentioned above - the feeling of a bullet destroying a block (asteroid) and then bouncing around and taking out other things is satisfying. In the final project I wouldn't say I struck the balance that I wanted. I ended up floating in the middle between the two genres, not really able to extract the best out of either. I'm proud and happy with what I was able to do in a short time frame - with more time and more work of course it would be better but this could be said about any project - this project was about having an idea, planning for that idea, executing that idea (and adapting the idea to challenges or just taking a better route) and keeping to an objective. Which in that regard has been a major success.

If you play the game, I hope you enjoy! I have been somewhat critical of the design here but that's because another point of this project was to improve design skills and if I'm not critical then I don't know what to improve on.

For the future, I'll see if this gets any plays, if it does I'd for sure update it and maybe port it to mobile as I think the controls and gameplay would transfer well. I've also got so many ideas relating to a follow up of this (naturally with mega out-of-scope ideas that should never be attempted but I would anyway haha)

Looking forward to the next one!