Rekindle Conclusions

First off, let's look at what I had done before (LOWREZ, FFS and the last version before this Jam):

The goal I set for this Jam was getting the Warp animation and 4-direction levels working. (This involved fixing the Space-Planet-Shop transition).

The good-news:

• I had the Art done for both Warping, several Space-lanes and Planets
• The game already had several minor improvements like Ship-tilting, Shattering, etc
• Only the FPS "cheat" (White) was done so I had 7 options left to greatly facilitate testing and debugging

The bad-news:

• I didn't make any sounds for warping or for each distinct level
• The game consumes a lot of RAM if played for a long period of time
• Having changed everything into PhaserJS Groups meant that I need to re-implement everything instead of copying from previous versions
• it would be an herculean task to do what I originally envisioned (a JSON file with every Ship, its health, level and which sprite and offsets the Thruster/Weapons have). Note that there is such a file except for weapon rotations/offsets but it's not used fully

All in all I'm glad I picked a short goal since it would take ages to fix everything. At first I was even tempted to use Phaser 3 but I quickly ignored that idea.

While some Game Engines, like the Godot Engine helps for having and IDE, I still have to remember what script does what and figure out why it's not working the way I want it too so, past self: Your idea wasn't bad, a total rewrite of the engine to use Phaser Groups instead of separate sprites and texture atlas (PNG+XML) is great but a lot of work when done to existing games. I likely won't touch this further after seeing how bad it ate RAM but the several ideas for the game were mostly good and this version improved on that

Here's the result (note that the level goes up as levels go by, making bigger and bigger ships appear):

As for the Rekindle Jam, I think it's a wonderful idea for those who just want to work on past projects instead of constantly making new ones, especially since it doesn't push you to apply a new theme or anything.

PS: You can play every edition on its GitLab Page as well as see the source code.