I really like the 1980s (even though I was born in the mid-2000s), and so when I heard that the GoedWare Jam theme was Space, I decided to make a game inspired by two great space shoot 'em up games, Space Invaders and Galaga. My entry was also inspired by a scene in Avatar: The Last Airbender episode; The Puppetmaster. In The Puppetmaster, two waterbenders are fighting and Waterbender A of them shoots a jet of water towards Waterbender B. Waterbender B bends the water around herself and throws it back at Waterbender A (see below). I thought that the redirection idea was really cool, so I designed my game around that being the central mechanic.

Day 1-3: I spent these days making an MVP (Minimum Viable Product). You (kite) and the enemies (square) can move left and right and if the enemies' bullets (triangles) are in the ring, you can press space to redirect them.

Day 4: I spent these days making the art using Aesprite, and making the sounds using Beepbox and JSFXR. I can't really describe the sounds using a written Devlog, but I can post pictures of the art, which were all inspired by Galaga ships.

Player ship- 

Enemy ship (Scorpion)- 

Enemy ship (Butterfly)- 

Enemy ship (Elephant)- 

Day 5: I made the lives system and gave the player four lives, instead of the traditional three. I felt the game was super challenging, so I gave players an extra life in order to try to balance it out. The game remembers where each enemy starts, and when you die, the ones that are still alive go back to where they started. When your live count hits zero, you have to restart from the beginning. In addition, I made the different ships do different things. The Scorpion is the default ship, the Butterfly has piercing bullets, and the Elephant has two lives.

Day 6: I spent the day adding the art, sound, UI, and menuing. My menus are always really poorly designed, so I spent a lot of time making this start menu. I also put the big number in the middle in the bottom right corner and put an enemy silhouette for extra readability. I really like the way the silhouette turned out, so I used them for my lives counter as well.

Day 7-9: I spent the last three days of the jam debugging and polishing. I'd fixed bugs as I found them throughout the jam, but there were plenty of small ones that I slipped through the cracks. There are probably more bugs that I didn't notice, but none of them should be game-breaking anymore. The majority of polishing was mainly screen wipes, with a few more things dabbled in here or there.

Lesson Learned: The big lesson I learned in this jam is that the closer your game is to completion, the slower progress is made. By the end of Day 6, my game was 90% done, and I thought polishing and debugging would only take a day, and I could spend the last two days making a video devlog. Except that the last 10% of the game ended up taking almost the entirety of days 7-9, meaning that I'm doing a written devlog instead. that last 10% of the game ended up taking 30% of my total work time, which means that I need to reconsider how I manage my time in future jams to avoid unexpected timesinks like that.