Alien Eliminator is a game based in space where you are a spaceship tasked with eliminating the population of malicious alien creatures which have taken root in a local asteroid system. They appear to have set up satellites that create an artificial asteroid belt to hide something. It is your job to find out what that is.
Evaluation & Reflection
Alien Eliminator in its current stage is not complete, but it has several game mechanics which were complicated to get working. There wasn’t much time put aside for user testing and this was only done twice throughout the development cycle. Some things that were noticed were that users would try clicking to shoot so it was switched from space bar to click to shoot to make the controls more intuitive.
The enemies would always appear too quickly on the screen as the spaceship came up on them and the players would be caught off guard. This wasn’t addressed as it wasn’t seen as a big issue due to the lack of player testing but it could have been fixed by making the enemies come up on the player a little more slowly or making their path to the player more sporadic.
Another issue was that players would be unable to realize the objective and would only accidentally destroy infested planets from shooting off the screen. Another thing that playtesting would have addressed. This could have been remedied by having a mini-map which showed enemies and the infested planets as objectives. This was thought about earlier in development but was dropped for trails of asteroids because of their simplicity, the effectiveness of this wasn’t tested. A better alternative or addition to the mini-map would would of been some kind of pointer which would point the player to the force field lower down on the map which upon shooting would show lasers coming from the origins of the satellites and the player would have instinctual decided to check out where the lasers were coming out of curiosity. Which would be genius effectively tricking the player into playing the game.
Acknowledgements & References
Play Testers: Dev, Rob
Special thanks to Rob for bringing back up the mini-map concept, and the importance for some kind of navigation mechanic.
Sound effect by Pixabay
https://pixabay.com/sound-effects/
Visual Assets By John (Me)
Game File
Requirements: rtx 8090 (2099 edition), i12 72000000 gen or Ryzen 32 64000 gen (with quantum tunneling inbuilt for optimal performance). Though a non quantum computer from 2023 should work just fine.
