PLEASE START US OFF BY INTRODUCING YOURSELF:


Hi, I’m Jacob, the solo dev behind Asteroid Emperor. I’ve been developing games for ~6 years or so- since I took my first game making class in university, but I’ve dreamt of making games since I was a little kid. I’m currently finishing up work on this roguelike game as my first official release!


TELL US ABOUT ASTEROID EMPORER.

Asteroid Emperor is a roguelike space shooter that uses randomly spawning asteroids to create a twist on the classic genre. 


I started off making Asteroid Emperor with only one person in mind, myself. I was always a big fan of roguelike games and sci-fi has always captured my imagination in a way no other genre could, so it made sense to combine those two into a space shooter. With the side to side space shooter core I intentionally threw out most other conventions of the genre and instead took inspiration from another classic game: Asteroids. In my game you play a kind of tennis, volleying asteroids back and forth between you and enemies while dodging missiles and lasers along the way. 


I took a lot from my favorite games at the time, namely FTL and Nuclear Throne. I consider it a good thing I never actually played the classic games I took early inspiration from like Galaga and Asteroids as my lack of experience with them kept me from falling into the stale pitfalls that a lot of those Galaga clones take. I instead based most of my game design decisions on the more modern games that I admire. 


HOW HAS THE DEVELOPMENT JOURNEY BEEN

Game Development for me, like any path created from passion, has been a very mixed bag. At the end of the day, making something I can be proud of has always been worth any negative feelings I have about being a game developer, and regardless of whether I find much commercial success in the space I think I’ll always make games. It’s what I love :)


WHICH GAME ENGINE DID YOU CHOOSE AND WHY?


I didn’t choose Construct as much as it chose me. I have experience developing in most of the more popular engines but I made Asteroid Emperor in Construct pretty exclusively because of a job I had early in my days of game dev. It was a very easy engine to use and at the time I didn’t intend for the game to get as big as it did (can you imagine a game developer struggling with scope?) so it made sense to use a simple engine that I was familiar with to quickly pump out a product. It’s funny to me because since I started development I’ve graduated from a computer science program and here I am still using visual scripting and event blocks. 


WHAT'S BEEN YOUR BIGGEST DEVELOPMENT HURDLE SO FAR?

The biggest hurdle for me hasn’t been so much development but the marketing and publicity side of game making. Getting people to play your game will always be the most difficult step of being successful as a developer and I’ve struggled with it from the get go. I’ve always felt a little embarrassed about wanting to make games as it’s felt like such a pipe dream, to the point where I used to keep my game dev hobby a secret from friends and family. Even now with me finally releasing this nearly 5 year long project I hate trying to advertise my game.


ADVICE FOR FELLOW DEVS?

Start small, don’t do what I did. Your first game shouldn’t take 4 years, it should be a smaller project that teaches you a good workflow and the basics of the important stuff like advertising, managing a release, and navigating the bureaucracy of the stores (Apple’s is particularly annoying to deal with). Also start advertising early, the earlier stages of development are fun and easier to get engagement with when shared on socials, and it’s a lot harder to share dev content later in the process when you’re mostly working on bugs and polish. Sharing early will also get you better feedback that you can actually take action on. 

Remember that game dev should be fun! Maybe not all the time but at least 50%.

ANY FINAL THOUGHTS?

Check out my game if you like roguelikes! Out now on iOS and Android.

For any game developers reading this feel free to hit me up for any collabs, I just finished a big project and finally have some time to have fun with this hobby and do some game jams. I've been bug fixing for 6 months now and nearly lost my mind. 


-Jacob

Asteroid Emperor by jalex (itch.io) 

❤️