Space Monsters: two weeks, four bosses and a ranking that trusts nobody / lippdev

Space Monsters started as a joke. lipp already flew around the site, so why not give him a gun? The first version came out on October 7: a browser shoot 'em up with meteors, one boss and a global ranking. Two weeks later it has four bosses, its own soundtrack and almost all of its art redone.

This is the log of how it got here.

A game that fits on a page

There is no engine. It is a canvas, one JavaScript file and a Node server with no dependencies, the same one that serves this blog.

The rules are arcade rules:

Hold to shoot. 50 shots per clip, and reloading takes a moment. Shooting nonstop has a price.
The dash goes through anything. It is the emergency exit.
The super clears the screen when its bar fills.
Every boss, a choice. Golden meteors and beaten bosses offer 1 of 3 upgrades, roguelite style: multi-shot, homing missiles, chain lightning, orbs, drones.

It works with mouse, keyboard, controller and touch. On a phone the screen stands upright and the game turns with it: the meteors fall from the top instead of coming from the right.

The bosses

Each boss enters like in Mega Man: the screen stops, the health bar fills, it says a line and the music changes. There are four now:

Mother Rock, a rock with lava inside.
The Mothership, metal and neon.
The Devourer, a planet with a mouth.
The Hive Queen, who arrived this week with hunters and mines.

Every round makes all of them tougher. If you only want to practice, go straight to boss practice, where lipp cannot die and nothing goes on the board.

A ranking that trusts nobody

The game runs in the browser, so the server never sees a run. It only hears what the browser tells it. Instead of pretending that is safe, I made the server suspicious:

Every run starts with a signed token that holds its start time and can be used once.
Along with the score, the browser sends the time alive, the stars, the grazes, the kills and the bosses. The score has to fit between the least and the most those numbers allow.
Nobody survives longer than the time since the token, or catches stars faster than the game drops them.

Can you lie within those limits? Yes. But then the lie has to be played well, and the admin panel can delete any score. For a portfolio game, that is enough.

Art from a brief, not a prompt

The first version used effects from free packs. They were fine on their own, but they did not match the painted bosses. It looked like three different games on one screen.

So I changed the process. Each batch of art became a document: what exists, what is wrong with it, the size of every frame, the palette, the references that must be attached. AI agents generate from the brief, and I review it and wire it into the game. There were four batches:

FX1: explosions, muzzle flashes, orbs and the drone.
UI1: the interface became a ship's panel, with rivets and neon, instead of website boxes.
SM2: the Hive Queen, the hunters, the mines, the bomb and the clock.
VD2: the whole Devourer, again.

The Devourer deserves a paragraph. It got huge (more than half off screen) and gained five attacks, but its art had been made for a small boss. Scaled up three and a half times, it was blurry. Its frames did not line up, so it "jumped" as it animated. And the ray, the tentacle and the rifts were shapes drawn in code, too smooth next to everything else. It was the first batch where the rule was to redo everything, not patch it.

Sound

The sound effects come from Mixkit's free library, and the bosses laugh at you with laughs taken from Pixabay and OpenGameArt. The soundtrack has a theme per boss; the Hive Queen's is called Swarm Protocol. You can hear all of it in the soundtrack player without playing.

What comes next

A weekly ranking, so the top 10 does not stand still.
Balancing the Devourer over a whole fight. The mechanics work, but nobody has tested the difficulty end to end.
More bosses. The Queen will not stay alone.

Every run now ends with a card of your score, ready to share. If you make the top 10, tell me. I want to know who knocked ACE off first place.