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SkysBane

Bitspace

A space bossfight, can you defeat the mothership?

How to Play

  • WASD or arrow keys to move
  • Spacebar to fire
  • X to reload
  • E to open/close upgrades and/or pause the game
  • R to disable tutorial

Game Description

Bitspace is a game in which you float about collecting orbs to upgrade your ship, eventually to defeat the mothership. It was developed Mar 14, 2022, by me, Aiden Morgan (CEO of SkysBane LLC). I designed and programmed it when I was 15 years old, so I can’t say that it’s the best game you’ll ever play. It is, however, surprisingly enjoyable (at least for me) to collect all the upgrades and defeat the boss. I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed making it!

Critiques of the Game

Since I designed this game, I’m far more experienced in game development. I don’t believe this game was designed to be perfect or even good, but I want to analyze it anyways.

Highlights of Bitspace

  • The music design is surprisingly good, for the extent of this game. It matches what the player is experiencing rather well
  • The drones are absolutely awesome
  • Relatively few bugs, feels coherent
  • Not a bad environment, somewhat interesting to navigate

Flaws of Bitspace

  • There’s no game loop. It’s actually just one, singular linear path. Wander aimlessly for money -> kill boss -> game over
  • Lack of proper title screen and settings
  • By the time you actually fight the boss, the player is too overpowered to actually face any real challenge
  • The game was not designed with performance in mind, although it runs fine most of the time
  • It is actually a roguelike, but it doesn’t offer a consistent challenge to the player, so the player will only ever fail after committing a significant amount of time doing nothing, meaning they are severely discouraged from a second attempt
  • Feedback to the player is poor on the reload feature specifically, as the player has no idea they are out of ammo until their gun stops working, and they have to press an arbitrary keyboard key to get ammo back.
  • Some upgrades are relatively pointless, like ship speed. The only thing ship speed does is potentially get you killed as you fly around the map, because you’re likely just going to collide with a planet. It doesn’t offer any additional maneuverability, so you’re still just as likely to get hit as you were before the upgrade