Turning Setbacks into Success, Publishing Your First Game

How I made the most of a missed opportunity to publish my first online game

It has been more than 10 years now. On February 21th, 2013, I was in a recruitment process for a Software Engineer position in one of the biggest game development companies on Earth. That day, I was given the task for the next step in the process, which was to develop a space invaders game, using Visual Studio, C++ and a small graphic library. I had never developed a game before… That task was a great challenge!

🎮 This is the webpage of the final game if you already want to play and read the history later.

After some days working during my free time, I finished the task using all the deadline, because I wanted the game to be the best I could develop. The image below is a screenshot of the final version.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t selected to go to the next step, but I didn’t throw all the work in the trash. I had just made my first game! It was amazing creating all the stages, the logic and seeing the bombs leaving the spacecraft and hitting the enemies. I had all the code implemented and just needed to choose another game engine, so other people could enjoy it as well.

After some days, I was working on a new version of the game, using Java and LWJGL 2 (Light Weight Java Game Library). I learned the basics of the library, translated all the code from C++ to Java, improved the game by adding textures, visual effects (explosions) and sounds (see the video below). This time, some family members and friends had the opportunity to try it. All the source code and the step by step to have it up and running in Eclipse IDE can be found in my GitHub.

The game was interesting, but being interesting just wasn’t enough. It was/is a desktop application, difficult to share and with strong dependencies on different Operational Systems (Windows, Linux and Mac). I wanted it to be playable on the internet using web browser.

That was when PlayN came into play. PlayN is a Java library for writing games which can be deployed to: Windows/Mac/Linux desktop Java, iOS devices, Android devices and HTML5 browsers. You write your code in Java and it’s available in all above platforms. At that time, I was more interested in having the game running in HTML 5 first, because I would use GAE (Google App Engine) so everybody was able to play on the internet.

Another phase was finished and all the game was ported to PlayN. New stages, enemies, bosses and the possibility to choose between 2 spacecrafts (Orion and Gemini) were implemented. New visual effects like smoke, explosion and a black box that the player can destroy and pick some item came into scene. I haven’t updated the game for the last years so one of the Maven dependencies responsible for the new soundtrack is not available anymore. That’s why there is no sound in the web version.

The first (web) version of the game was launched in May 5th, 2013. Since then, it’s one of the games in the PlayN select gallery.

In summary, the main goal of this article is to share this story as a simple example that we can take advantage of missed opportunities and turn it into something positive. During those months, I learned new technologies, programming techniques and enjoyed each moment to get ready and better for new challenges. I knew that if I improved the game and made it accessible worldwide, I could use it as a personal project and (why not?) make a reference to it in my curriculum vitae; I could also have the codes available online and share this open source project with other developers; and the most important, I could have a game for anyone interested in having fun. It is not a huge success in the jungle of millions of games, but looks like some players from different countries have tried it during these 5 years. Below some data from Google Analytics.

“It’s through curiosity and looking at opportunities in new ways that we’ve always mapped our path.” Michael Dell

https://sites.google.com/view/ufoinvasiongame/home

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