My Experience Creating A Phaser Game In Koji
Guest Post by Florin Gusa (aka WiLD)
I first wanted to make a platformer, but I wasn’t sure I could get it done in time, so I picked something that I was sure I could finish in 5 hours while also streaming the process on YouTube.
I’ve always wanted to make a bullet hell style game since I love games like the Touhou series and DonPachi so I found this to be the perfect opportunity to try and emulate the essence of those games in just 5 hours.
The first design decision was whether to make it a mobile or a desktop game, I figured a bullet hell game would be awkward on mobile, as your finger is covering most of the screen and you can’t get really precise movement as you would with a keyboard and mouse. So I decided to go for desktop. I also wanted to have all these cool bullet patterns and bosses but I ended up running out of time and just reverted to having one boss and a single bullet trajectory. Let me also talk a bit about my experience with Koji.
I found Koji to be a great platform for quickly testing and deploying apps, I found the asset management system really nice to work with, usually web based development tools struggle with that but with Koji it wasn’t much different than working on desktop and in some cases it was even better. It was really easy to switch between code and testing and found it to be very efficient.
One thing that really slowed me down was the fact that streaming took a lot of power, making the editor somewhat laggy but I was able to work with it anyway. Maybe now that I’ve won I can buy a better PC! *chuckling*. I decided to make a game instead of an app, because I’m a game developer by trade and it’s what I do best so it just made sense but with Koji I don’t think it would’ve taken me any longer to make some sort of app since it’s pretty easy to just pick a template and work from it. And that’s a big reason why I think Koji will become the leading platform for new developers to start making things since anyone can do it.
The project was really fun to work on, it was also my first time using Koji and it didn’t really take long to get used to the workflow. I wish I had more time to fix up the hitboxes and make the game somewhat more responsive and fair but 5 hours is really not a lot of time. I can’t wait to work with Koji again and do more awesome stuff with it and the great team behind it.
