Alphabet Games was a project I initially intended to complete using Unity. Unfortunately, after I completed two games, Unity announced some pretty harsh pricing schemes. I put this project on the back burner while I decided which engine to switch to, and to work on some other projects I had going on. Godot will be the engine moving forward. Unity Pricing NYT.
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I wanted to create a piece of art that I could be proud of. Throughout my life, I have dabbled in different types of art and, at times, have even fancied myself an artist. Before I die (morbidity, ew), I want to create something that is loosely art, something I consider beautiful, and that someone else enjoys. The entire reason this site exists is to market this game in the long term. A better format might be YouTube, but learning video editing is not something I have time for now or in the foreseeable future. And if I'm completely honest with myself, I don't have an interest in having a "public" persona, even if it is behind some form of obfuscation.

I don't believe what I create will be a hit. I don't believe it has a right to be.

I like to mitigate mistakes on a project I really care about. When given the time, I accomplish this by making dummy projects to test different features and techniques as I research the best route to reach my goal. Thus, Alphabet Games is born. The goal is to create 26 different and very simple games as I learn various aspects of Unity Godot. The only real rule is that I must figure out a name that starts with a letter that hasn't been used yet. The order doesn't matter (although, yes, my first two games in Unity were Arachnid Anxiety and Boat), the time doesn't matter (I have a 3-year-old and a full-time job), and the genre doesn't matter (in fact, I hope to diversify the genres as much as possible). The main goal is to create things with the intention of learning as fast as possible.

Arachnid Anxiety is the second game in my Unity alphabet series.

It's a top down shooter where spiders spawn in and attack you.
If they touch you the game is over.
They shoot webs that temporarily slow you down.
One shot one kill.
I also made a pretty cool start screen.
Follow the link above to see that start screen and play the action adventure of the century.

One of the main issues with Arachnid Anxiety is the lack of a crosshair, so the only way to know which way you're pointing is by the orientation of your character. Not knowing where the mouse is on the screen makes it pretty annoying to try to turn on a dime when an arachnid is breathing down your neck. I thought of using a crosshair to mark mouse placement but decided against it. I'm planning to rebuild both this and Boat in Godot; I'll fix it then. With Arachnid Anxiety, I started figuring out how to get a game object to stay within a certain distance of another game object while “facing” the same direction in 2D space. My goal was projectiles based on player direction, and I was already way off course.

A significant learning curve for me when learning Python and how to give instructions to a computer was crafting a search term or phrase that was simple enough and ambiguous enough that Stack Overflow (or similar sites) had an answer. Instead of "how to move a rook on a chess board from A1 to A7 in Python," it was "update index in 2D array." The opposite is true in game programming. So while I did eventually get something that almost worked, searching for:
1. Fire projectile from Game Object
2. Keep Game Object specified distance from other Game Object
3. Orient Game Object based on another Game Object's orientation
There was a much easier way.

After a Not Embarrassing Amount of Time™ and in the middle of writing the phrase “game object move based on other game object,” I had a moment of clarity. Many people have tried to make a top-down shooter, and more than one of them has asked the question “how to make character shoot.”

The spiders are animated (sort of). There are 2 leg positions that should rotate on a regular interval but do not. Let’s say their movement is a little more energetic than it should be.

As mentioned before, there is no crosshair indicator. You can tell which direction the projectile will fire based on where the projectile spawner (gun) is pointed. It’s pretty difficult to keep track of character orientation when you’re in the middle of having anxiety about all the arachnids coming after you. Another funny thing about the character movement is if you hold forward and left or right without moving the mouse, the character starts spinning chaotically when the sprite reaches the mouse.

Arachnid Anxiety felt like it could be a real game eventually. I think what really put it over the edge into "possibly could be fun maybe" territory is the addition of the spider webs that slowed the character down. It feels weird to say it, but it was a significant jump in game design from a very last-minute addition before I moved on to my next project. I am pretty proud of it.

Boat was the first game I made and had two fundamental concepts.
1. Coin make counter go up.
2. Bouy make counter go down.
That's it. Coins spawn as soon as you pick up all existing coins. Buoys never despawn (ohh, incrementally increasing difficulty, I may be a game designer yet). I had issues with keeping the buoys and coins on screen but was able to adjust the spawn area. Bad assumption: play area is the same size as the screen area. I did not even attempt to fix the player's boat's ability to motor away forever off-screen with no indication of where exactly they were. Three fixes I can think of immediately are:
1. Adjust camera based on boat's distance from center.
2. Big red arrow that grows as boat gets further off screen.
3. Invisible or visible barriers.