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[gamedevver]

Hello everyone,

A couple of months ago I started learning unity. Now I'm working on my second indie game called Jetpack Q, and I decided to share some of the progress. Keep in mind I'm very new to game development but I would very much like to hear what you think about it.
If you want to try it out I posted an early access version on itch.io: https://gamedevver.itch.io/jetpack-q
and gamejolt: https://gamejolt.com/games/Jetpack-Q/635689

The plan is to make a mobile game and when it's finished I would like to publish it in the google Play Store. The game is supposed to be an endless runner game.

You play as a character with a jetpack, planes are coming at you and they're firing rockets. The goal is to avoid the rockets they fire and shoot the planes out of the sky. So stay alive for as long as possible and get your score as high as possible.

Some screenshots of how it looks now:





Right now the very basics of the game are done so there is something playable. The biggest issues right now I think are:

- A lack of originality

- There isn't really a way to progress further in the game

- The graphics aren't really that great either

So I've been working on making something that tracks your stats so that you can see how many kills, shots, hits taken, etc. you have gotten over time. Now I'm working on making some powerup's and being able to use your stats as currency to buy/use them.

Some screenshots of what I'm working on:




I have some more ideas for the game but I'm not exactly sure which I'm actually going to use and for how long I will keep working on the game, so we'll see how the game turns out.

I will try to upload more content regularly.

[gamedevver]

Hello everyone,

I've barely had any time to work on my game the last two weeks so there I haven't made that much progress. But I still wanted to share the progress I have made.

If you wanna try the game you can check it out on itch.io and gamejolt.

itch.io: https://gamedevver.itch.io/jetpack-q
gamejolt: https://gamejolt.com/games/Jetpack-Q/635689

The first thing I did was changing the shooting mechanic. At first you had to press a button every time to shoot, but since that made the gameplay feel a bit uncomfortable I changed it. Now the shooting goes automatically when you hold your finger on the screen.

Then I made the game keep track of your stats. So things like highscore, kills and hits taken are saved in the game. This way you can track your progress and it's also used as a sort of currency for the powerups.

After that I continued working on the stats and shop system. I thought and still think the game lacks player rewards. So I hope the shop and powerups will make that a bit better.
I now have 3 working powerups:

- a shield
- extra hearts
- an explosion that destroys everything.

Right now you can only start using the powerup when you have enough of a certain stat. Then you can select one powerup at a time and you can use that one 3 times in a game. Then by clicking a button while playing you activate the powerup.

Here are some pictures:







Sadly I have made very little progress lately however in the near future I will be having more time, so there will hopefully be much more progress.
I still wanna add more powerups and just make the game much more interesting to play.

Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoyed! Let me know what you think!

[gamedevver]

Hello everyone,

New powerups
Last week I have added some more powerups and some upgradable things.
So there is a one shot rocket and a fireball that keeps doing damage once you hit a plane. Also you can now upgrade the frequency at which you fire. So at the beginning you fire every 0.5 second by upgrading you can decrease that. I did the same thing for the amount of damage one bullet does.





Options menu
There still wasn’t an options menu so I started working on that. This probably shouldn’t take that long, however I have never made anything like an options menu before especially not in unity. So I’m just figuring out how to connect the menu to the different settings of the game.
You can now only control the main volume and I have started the design of the menu, but the design right now is really ugly I think. But I didn’t work on it for that long so it should become much better.

Upcoming content
I’m not really planning on putting a lot of new features in the game. At least not before the final release. I’ll probably mostly be working on improving the art and design of the game, sadly. That is in my opinion the hardest and least fun part. The art work is probably my weakest point. Things like improving and adding particle effects, improving the way some assets look, maybe adding some camera shake and the sound effects for sure. While playtesting I started realizing how bad some of those points are. That is mostly because I put the least time into that and because I’m not good at it. So that is probably what I will be working on now for the most.
Even though I probably won't be uploading all of the games' future updates on itch.io or gamejolt you can still check out the latest version right now at:
itch.io: https://gamedevver.itch.io/jetpack-q
gamejolt: https://gamejolt.com/games/Jetpack-Q/635689

Question
I have been trying to reach more people here on tigsource about my game. But I would like to reach even more people, but I’m very new to this and still not really sure where to do that. So my question is if anyone has any advice/experience about this?

Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoyed!

[gamedevver]

Font type
The first thing I thought about when thinking about making my game look better was the font type. The whole gameplay is made with pixel art, because that is supposed to be the style of the game. However all the text in the menu's weren't written with a pixel font, so I decided to change that first.
This is the best font in my opinion I found so far.





This is another one I found not completely sure yet:



For now onto the next improvement!

[gamedevver]

Hello people,

I've once again been busy but I'm not too disappointed by the work that I managed to get done.
You can still check out the latest version of the game I uploaded.
Itch.io: https://gamedevver.itch.io/jetpack-q
Gamejolt: https://gamejolt.com/games/Jetpack-Q/635689

Light
I started learning and playing around with lights in unity. I'm quite satisfied with the result. My goal was to make more contrast between different parts of the screen to make it look more interesting. And also draw more attention to the play button.
I also added a very small sun together with the light.



Background
I also made a sort of skyline as a background. This could probably be better and it still needs a bit of improvement in the game. But I think on it own it looks quite reasonably. I'm planning on maybe making more of these kind of things to make the background more exciting, since now it's just blue and clouds.



Pause menu
The last thing I worked on is a pause menu. I haven't put that much effort in it yet so it should be looking much better when I am finished. It isn't working the way I want yet and it also doesn't look as I would like.



Upcoming
- So I'm planning on making some more things for in the background like the skyline I made. I think right now the background
  is pretty boring and this could be much better.

- Still like last times I want to make some particles and images look better.

- I'll be working on a good looking and functioning pause menu.

- And maybe most importantly I'll be fixing some bugs. There are some bugs in the shop system, and when you actually download
  this version on a phone the shooting doesn't start at level 1 for some reason. It immediately starts shooting really fast.
  So I'll be fixing that

Thank you for reading!