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Hello, I wanted to share what I've decided to work on for this game jam! I just started today, actually (thanks, procrastination) so I'm not very far, but I like what I have so far.

I decided to expand on a game I made a few months ago for a hackathon. The game itself was sort of half-baked, since it wasn't actually the project we were working on. (We made an online leaderboard website, but we needed to make a simple game that we could use to demonstrate submitting a high score. You can't have a high score leaderboard without any scores!) Here's what that version of the game looked like, if anyone was wondering.

It's a very simple top down shooter. We likened it to Vampire Survivors. Enemies spawn in, and you can move around and shoot them. Points are scored for killing enemies, and a score multiplier is applied the longer you go without damage. As the game goes on, enemies spawn faster (and you get a little stronger too, in the form of bullet pierce) until eventually you get overwhelmed and die.

For this game jam, I want to expand on the game and make it a little more like Vampire Survivors. I don't really have any concrete goal in mind for what the final product will be like (and it probably won't be very polished lol), but here are some general goals I have in mind:

• Experience and Leveling up
  • Enemies drop experience orbs, which you can pick up
  • Getting enough (how much?) experience will level you up
  • Increase damage, pierce, etc?
• Different types of enemies
  • Current only enemy type simply follows and swarms player
  • Different movement patterns (rush from one direction?)
  • Slower, high damage enemies (bosses?)
  • Enemies drop useful items (health?)
• Different weapon types
  
  • Different spread, speed, damage, sizes?
  • Passive weapons?
• Pickups
  • Health
  • Vacuum
  • Screen clear
  • Others?

Other than the basic movement, shooting, and enemies (which were simple to do, since I already had experience making that before), most of what I have working so far is related to pickups. When the player gets close to a pickup, it starts following the player until it collides with the player and then it activates its effect. This is a really nice effect, and it makes it a lot easier to collect pickups without making it seem like they're just disappearing like it would if you just increased the collider size.

Four types of pickups are currently working:

• Experience - picking this up currently just increases the player's exp value. I haven't done anything with a level up system yet.
• Vacuum - picking this up causes all pickups of a certain type to immediately start moving towards the player. The main use for this is experience, but I made it  so you can vacuum any type of pickup (So you could have a health vacuum, or even a vacuum vacuum!)
• Health - picking this up heals the player. The one in the video heals 10 damage, but this is configurable.
• KillAll / Screen Clear - picking this up kills all of the enemies currently loaded instantly (might want to make it only enemies on screen?)

The next thing I'm probably going to work on is the level up system, allowing the user to choose between upgrades on level up. I'll probably start with pierce, damage, and max health as the upgradable stats, and work from there.

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I didn't know where else to put this so I'll shove it at the end, but look at this cool bug I made earlier. I accidentally set the spawner to spawn enemies once per frame instead of once per second and it created this cool looking tube of enemies from the spawner to the player. Neat!