I did a lot of things I haven't done before (in this blog) for Shunt. I think beginnings and endings are the hardest part of any medium, and I was tired of the same-old infinite game that I've been doing (which is like telling a story with no beginning and no end). To that end, Shunt has both a real tutorial and a finite amount of game to play.
This game pretty clearly is a continuation of last week's experiment, but with a lot of improvements. I changed the movement system completely, gave the ship "arms," and put a little point light at the nose of the vessel so the player can get a better feel for how close they are to objects.
The goal of the game wasn't changing, I already knew I wanted it to be about shooting cubes across space into goal zones. And I already had that, so the only thing left to make was enemies. Shunt has interesting enemies, since they don't kill anything. There's no fail state for Shunt, and because of that I didn't bother putting in a pause screen or a restart button (I probably should have for convenience, but hey). Still, the enemies feel important because their attacks can really mess you up if you let them. Which is part of why it feels so good to blow them up.
If you want to let me know what you think of Shunt, or other games on this blog, you can tweet @JacobDMooney, or leave a comment below! In the meantime, Play Shunt!
Menu music is by p0ss and is used under this license.
Game music is by CynicMusic and is used under this license.
P.S. The web player for this week says "Week 11," even though it's definitely week 12. Ignore that.
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