Finally dusting off this blog of mine with an announcement which I am very excited about. I will be participating in the Devtober Game Jam!

Seemingly inspired by Inktober, the drawing-a-day month-long challenge, Devtober is not your average game jam. Rather than emphasizing The Crunch of having to complete a game in only 48 hours or less, Devtober, encourages maintaining a daily game development habit. So throughout the entire month of October I will be making incremental game progress every single day, and posting about the highlights on my Twitter handle @StarryNiteGames.

The Rules

1. Work on a game a little every day
2. Post your progress on social media (use the hashtag #devtober!)
3. On the very last day, write a post-mortem

The Game: Kuiper

For Devtober I will continue development of one of the first games I started in my post-college game dev days. Kuiper is a twist on the classic asteroids shooter formula. You play a spaceman in a fragile EVA suit out on a space walk in the frigid Kuiper belt. The only protection from asteroid collision and enemy blaster fire is the water ice you harvest from asteroids and recrystallize around your suit.

The fully realized vision of Kuiper is a fast-paced shooter that uses physics and a dynamic destruction/construction engine to make the player feel as though they are a nuclear armed katamari rampaging through an icy asteroid belt. In order to survive the player must maintain a constant balance between strengthening their protective ice shell by harvesting asteroids and fending of their opponents who seek to de-shell the player and send them hurtling into the frigid expanse.

I originally developed the game on the Godot game engine as part of My First Game Jam 2019, and it is still available to play online on itch.io as it was when I originally submitted. I have made incremental progress on its development since then, and yet, in its current state it is still hardly a game and lacks most of the features I hoped to cram in over the course of the jam. But I have come a long way in game programming, design, and knowledge of the game engine since I submitted the original Kuiper prototype. My goal for the end of October is to have built Kuiper into a rough vertical slice of its fully realized vision.

Objectives

By the end of October I will need to have a rough vertical slice of the game, which is to say have everything implemented to demonstrate its core gameplay loop.

• Revamp destructible asteroids and accreting ice shells.
• Add animated sprites and improve overall visuals.
• Add asteroid hopping and crawling mechanics.
• Very simple AI to fight against.
• Make it into a playable HTML5 browser game (optional)

Follow Along

If you want to follow the development of Kuiper or anything I get up to in the future, check me out on @StarryNiteGames.