Cosmic Spike
The first game I’ve shipped to the public! Made with Xcode and Swift for the iOS App Store.
This video shows the main menu screen with all of the unlockable skins, music and movement choices, and the start of the game.
This is some high octane gameplay right here!
Making Cosmic Spike taught me,
• Using functional decomposition is key to creating a complex program with many working parts. It helps you break a big problem into a bunch of smaller, more manageable problems that are easier to grasp and solve.
• Having a growth mindset is extremely important to maintain while working on a big project that will take lots of time and effort to finish.
• The last 10% of making a game is definitely the hardest part (I will try to optimize this experience in my next game).
• Having an organized code base makes it much easier to implement new features and debug stuff.
• Before you implement a feature, make sure your understanding of the concepts you are working with are 100% correct. (I tried to implement an audio beat visualizer by looking at music level slopes and finding peaks in the values, which I thought represented a beat, but it turns out this isn’t the case at all… If I would have tried to implement the audio visualizer the normal, more complex way, I probably would have spent less time and energy and gotten the feature implemented in the final game…)
• Art is hard for me, better to hire an artist to make assets.
• It's possible for me to make a game using software and a language I’ve never used before. It seems hard at first, but with time and some hard work anything is possible!