Saucer

 Saucer is a fast-paced dodging bullet-hell game that makes itself unique by limiting how much you can go in each direction at once using a "gas" mechanic. This mechanic would keep things interesting by making it so you could not abuse the spawning velocities of the "asteroids".

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 My role in the development of Saucer was that of a middle-college student who had 10 hours to burn. I did this entirely on my own within that time. I would later do some slight polish as people had fun and started competing at my high school.

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The Player Controls

 Given the short development time and my lack of experience at the time (my first time scripting w/o nodes), there isn't much of interest here. What is of interest here is how the unconventional "gas" system came to be. This has to do with player controls.

 Originally, I wanted to mess around with a control system similar to the classic arcade game, Asteroid. To this effect, I put together a prototype featuring a triangle for the player, that, like in the final game, would wrap around the screen. It's notable that in this prototype, the player could only go forwards and turn.

 Unfortunately, the trig didn't work out and the ship's turning would be offeset from the way it moves forward. This is most visible from the start when you press forward in the prototype, where the ship will slowly go up and right instead of just up.

 Additionally, if you tried to go forward while turning, the direction moving forward would only update roughly every 90 degrees... but would also shift towards the opposite end you were turning. This was also less than optimal.

 With this, I decided to go with a more conventional Up-Down-Left-Right movement system, while also making the velocity a bit less crazy to navigate with, resulting in the movement seen in the current game. I felt I wanted to try to do something new with this though... given it's now rather conventional nature.

 What I would come up with is the "gas" system. You could only press each button for a certain amount of time, before you had to effectively wait a second for it to recharge before you could go in that direction again. This limited the amount of movement you could do going in a single direction and encouraged varied movement patterns. I liked it.

 Add in the "asteroids" and introduce incrementing spawn rates, a timer, and some difficulty modes, and you've got the Saucer of today. I also made sure that asteroids couldn't be too close to the same size or color as the player, so as to prevent confusion. With the reception it got at my high school I was able to get a lot of playtesting in during lunch where people would have fun competing. I used that to introduce some bugfixes, tweaks, and a secret "Hell" difficulty (hidden on the title screen).

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