Space Monsters is out, my third video-game done in a week (4 days in this case) for a Week Sauce game jam. The theme this time was…

Imagine a game you love is the sequel to an earlier, previously unknown, but recently rediscovered game. Make that game.

To tell you the truth, I don’t think I ever played the original Invaders arcade, but I probably did one of the more colorful late updates. Luckily, as a legendary classic, it was easy to find a lot of information online about it. In particular this video was really useful in figuring out sounds and how info screens were drawn, and Christopher Cantrell’s Computer Archeology site helped immensely with his analysis of the original code. The Classic Gaming site also had some great images, sounds, and details.

Learning about all the tricks used in the original, from moving only one invader every tick (a hardware limitation) being the origin of the enemies accelerating as you eliminate them, to having the CRT screen rotated vertically being the reason the invaders are more square than the squished pixel version we are used to today, or the cellophane bands that colored the black and white screen, was a real treat for me. I tried to simulate all that as much as possible: for example you will see the bullets changing color from white to red or green as they go over the top or bottom of the screen.

But after deciding to do this game, I could not really visualize what would have come before. There are reports of the original idea having a naval theme instead of aliens, but just changing the graphics didn’t seem that interesting to me. So I decided to go with a “what if you control the invaders” theme instead.

At first, this seemed like a great idea to me: you would control one invader, and to move it you swap places with the ones around you. As the cannon kills invaders, you will have holes in the formation that would stop you from moving, making it more difficult as you progressed towards the bottom of the screen.

But once I implemented this I realized it was not such a great design. For starters, you don't have any control on who is gonna die. You have some defensive capabilities, as your shots can collide with the cannon's; but the precision and speed needed, and the automatic movement of the invaders, make this more a matter of randomness than skill. I played with the idea of having the red UFO show from time to time and drop a power-up that would let you change the formation of the remaining invaders, but at the end it was too much work for not much gain.

As my friend Markus pointed out, the main problem with the game is that it recreates the worst part of the original: the targeted shot at the end of a level when there is only one invader left running towards you. The nicest part of Space Invaders, when at the beginning of every wave you can just blindly fire and hit something, is nowhere to be seen in Space Monsters.

I also got some comments on the scoring (would be better if you were getting points instead of losing them, but I was already committed to the inverse Invaders theme), and on the position of the protagonist (the invaders would have been better starting at the bottom and going up, with the cannon at the top of the screen). 

All in all it ended up being not a super fun game, but a fun experiment for me to make, and a good reminder that not every game idea I have deserves spending more time trying to "fix it". 😆

Cheers!