link to play - https://albertsliang.itch.io/cybersky
Cybersky is a nostalgic arcade shooter with some infinite runner aspects. We really wanted to combine our ideas of a a retro arcade game with more rpg-esque aspects and an overall futuristic themes. I worked primarily as a programmer on this project, and created most of the backgrounds that randomly generated. The idea was you play as a ninja that travels across the world fighting enemies. We wanted to focus on the fun more than anything.
From an art perspective - we really wanted it to feel like the player went around the world and that it felt vibrant and colorful. We tried to have something on every continent/area of the world, but some things just didn't translate well in the cyberpunk aesthetic. As for the process, I would take the original image and put it in Photoshop, recoloring it with a palate until I got the desired outcome. I would make the palates first, searching online for reference images and color picking from them. Then I would draw whatever was in the background/foreground, usually clouds or castles. Most the time I would have to completely redraw the reference as they would get really messy once they were resized to fit the original image.
In all, I think these backgrounds really sold our concept and helped breathe life into the game. And our players seemed to really like them! People would comment on some of the inside joke backgrounds (particularly one where the player is running through UT Austin), or remark on the quality of the art overall.
From a programming perspective - this game was really challenging. We made it using Phaser3, an open source Javascript game engine. I had limited experience with JS going into this project, and none with Phaser. But I did have experience with game development, and was able to refine a lot of our messy code into better code. We did struggle a lot with the Phaser documentation, as most of it seems to be fore an earlier version, and the documentation for 3.0 is lengthy and not well explained. Maybe I'm just spoiled by the Unity documentation, but a lot of the time in Phaser I just had to guess and check what a function did. It isn't very user friendly, and most of the forums suggested using 2.5 instead, which did have ample documentation. However 3.0 was a class rule, so we were doing to need to figure it out on our own.
We weren't able to refactor as much as we wanted due to time constraints, but we were able to tackle a good amount of the code.
All in all, Cybersky was a resounding success. I learned so much about coding in JS and coding more broadly as well. My team was amazing, and we really created something fantastic. I highly suggest you take a crack at playing as well, and tell me how far you got! We worked really hard on balancing the game, but I've heard it's still a challenge for most. Good luck!
