I cast "Magic Missile"!

Missile command. One of my favorite games from "back in the day". This is my attempt to remake it later, and to apply some variations to it. Yet another piece of work done in Flash, which makes it easy to link to.

Missile Commander

Since this is one of the few games that I've actually written to a point that I feel is finished, I can actually do a realistic post mortem on it now.



Overview:
This was intended to be sort of almost a "journeyman" project in game design and programming for me. I basically set two challenges for myself: "Can I come up with enough variations to populate a reasonable number of levels with new mechanics?" and "Can I convince myself to sit down and start, continue and complete a full-scale project like this?" It feels like a success on both counts, so yay!


Specifics:
The basic idea is standard missile command. You protect things on the bottom, by blowing up attackers from the top. Your shots create explosions, and chain reactions can be used to wipe out several things at once. So far, all of this is pretty faithful to the original. What I did to try to spice it up was introduce the concept of "cities".

The player controls up to 4 of them, and switches between them with the keyboard, while targeting missiles with the mouse. While the basic cities are all standard missile launchers, this gave me some neat design freedom to make cities that did rather unique things, in addition to merely launching standard attacks.

I also introduced the idea of each city having its own recharge bar. This worked as an excellent balancing mechanism, since then I could make some cities that did some truly crazy things, but balance them by giving it a long recharge, and forcing the player to cover for it with other cities in the mean time.

The main other direction that I introduced new and neat things, was in the selection of things that would fly down from the top of the screen to harass the player. While I was a bit more creative with player verbs than I was with enemies, I still managed a reasonable number of annoyances. And I was extremely proud of managing an actual, honest-to-goodness boss at the end.

The only other place I did much of interest was in breaking the game into discrete levels, and giving them various goals. I didn't do as much as I could have with this, however, and most levels were basically some variation on "save at least X cities".

One rule I did stick with for levels however, was "one new mechanic per level". I made sure that every level in the game either introduced a new type of enemy, or a new building for the player to enjoy. I think this may have been one of the single best design decisions I made on the project, since it allowed me to ease the player in to new mechanics over the course of several stages. (For example, the game had a theme of "force fields protect you, but are destroyed by electricity" that was built up over several levels of progression.)

General things I think I did well:

• Lots of neat cities
• A fair number of neat enemies
• The pacing was generally good
• The end boss ruled, and was a good top to the game.

General things I think I could have done better:

• The game could have greatly benefited from sound, and possibly a slightly higher framerate.
• Level 10 was entirely too hard. All the levels before and after it were ok, but that one was an absurd spike in the difficulty ramp, for the sake of one neat mechanic/effect I wanted to play with.
• Some of the later levels, the art choice (dark missiles against a dark background) were occasionally frustrating.
• Later levels could also get fairly hard. I think I succumbed to the trap of "it's easy for me, who has been playing it all month!"
• The end boss requires you to wait through too much animation before you actually get to fight him. (It's cool the first time. Tedious on repeated viewings however, and there is no way to skip.)
• Would have been nice to have had a more satisfying ending. It's basically just a "you win!" screen. The battle, etc, was great, but some graphical fanfare would not have been inappropriate.