So I’m starting a new game, already.

The tower defense thing isn’t dead, but something else popped up.

A guy on this Reddit post says his entire game is a placeholder. The art is a placeholder, there’s no sound, and the code is not going to hold up. He was gonna have his girlfriend make the art, but they broke up. So it’s just…placeholders. The game itself is a placeholder.

Which reminded me of Upgrade Complete, a Flash game from back in the day where literally everything was upgradeable. The graphics. The weapons. The music. Very meta, very funny, and fun.

Let’s try something in the same vein.

Placeholder

A top-down vertical shmup. You’re a gray rectangle. The enemies are placeholders. There’s no music. There’s no score. It’s bland, stripped down.

Yeah…I could do that…I think

But you collect money. And after each wave, you can upgrade stuff. Pay to add game features like guns, pay to add enemy sprites and music. I called the upgrade process a Budget Meeting but since then renamed it to Outsource. The process of funding the game’s development, buying sprite assets and music.

The above aren’t placeholders, I mean, they are. But, the placeholders will be included in the final game. At least, until you upgrade assets.

Getting the loop working

Title screen → Wave (dodge enemies, collect money) → Buy upgrades → Next wave → repeat.

The enemies and money are choreographed per wave, hand-curated spawn tables:

const WAVES := [
    [
        {time = 1.0, type = "enemy", x = 240, speed = 80, health = 1},
        {time = 2.0, type = "enemy", x = 160, speed = 80, health = 1},
        {time = 2.0, type = "enemy", x = 320, speed = 80, health = 1},
        {time = 2.5, type = "money", x = 350, speed = 60, value = 10},
        {time = 3.5, type = "enemy", x = 100, speed = 90, health = 1},
        {time = 3.5, type = "enemy", x = 240, speed = 90, health = 1},
        {time = 3.5, type = "enemy", x = 380, speed = 90, health = 1},
        # ...
    ],
]

Each entry says when to spawn, where, the speed. I think most top-down 2D shooters spawn enemies in a preset pattern that’s learnable, not random spawns.

Eventually, there will be different enemies, and different movement variations etc.

I’m not sure if a hardcoded array is the best way to keep this data…feels OK-ish? I don’t want to do Resources, that seems like more of a pain to manage. Spreadsheet → CSV export also seems about the same, maybe slightly easier for batch editing.

Let me know if anyone has recommendations.

Here’s some of the stuff I have planned:

• A slow loading screen, pay to make it faster.
• “Cosmetic” items that secretly have real gameplay effects. Just like real games!
• An impossibly expensive $10,000,000 option to just unlock the whole game and skip to credits.

This is fun. Since the whole point is that the game starts unfinished, feels like I can have a half-ass demo sooner than later.