Lightgoose

Features:

• Lighting lighthouses
• Firebullets
• Hard mode (for crazy people)
• Goose

Oi! This is a tiny game I made in about three weeks. After a bunch of long projects I never managed to finish I decided to make something I could finish. This is the result. A game about firespitting birds, and a goose lighting lighthouses. 

So when I first came up with the idea it was nowhere near where it is now. I think it begun as me sitting and having nothing to do. So I went, alright, what can I make in a short time, and that has a tiny scope? A game about boats that are guided by lighthouses seemed like something I could do. So I thought what you would actually do, and thought that the lighthouses could be unlit and you would have to light them. 

I kept going with the idea, and soon I thought of you shooting enemies and lighting the lighthouses to help the boats.  I also thought that full randomly generated would be a cool thing, so I added that the todo. Full random generation would be really stupid for this project, it wouldn't really benefit from it at all, no interesting gameplay would happen thanks to it. So I went with something way simpler and made simple randomly generated islands. 

Then it just rolled on from there, I messed with boids for the enemies, but they didn't really provide anything, so I cut everything from that and just used the avoidance for the enemies. Enemies got finished, I added the player, added the fires. "Simple" as that. 

Then. The beast. Menus. I hate UI. It usually breaks immersion, and I just don't like dealing with it. It was pretty easy to add in pico8, and I actually enjoyed polishing it up (you can tell I spent wayyy too much time on it heh). The system for switching between menus was not fun though, but it worked.

A really interesting thing, a friend of mine played the game while I was sitting by the side and inschpecting. He went up to the lighthouse and began to shoot at it, not noticing the circle getting larger, that was supposed to show him he was making progress. I actually thought before deciding on how to light the lighthouses that you would shoot at it, but I decided on the time based style. I think that was dumb, firing at it would be more intuitive and would make it easier for everyone playing the game. Welp.