Thy TV hath been Blasted
For the 3 of you out there that read my blog entries, your probably aware of the little game I was working on for Game Design class. Well I had a partner and he did all of the programming…but I did 90% of the original graphic work as well as a large chunk of testing 
But anywho, the game wad due a week from when it was assigned to us (Monday). We we’re able to finish the game and I think the entire class was really impressed. Most of the other people didn’t put nearly as much work into their games as we did. But anyways, I decided that it would be cool to release it for people to play!
As I said before, Blast TV is a rip-off of the classic game Smash TV. There were various versions of the game but the ones I’m familiar with are the NES and the SNES version. It had a cool (probably unwieldy) control scheme you could use which utilized played with two controllers at once. I’ve never tried playing that way, I just thought it was a cool tidbit of information :p The basic theme is that your on a TV show and you’ve got to collect as many prizes as you can without dying a horrible, arena-related death. There are various weapons and power-ups that you can collect to help you through the game.
In Blast TV there are two types of baddies that you’ll face. There’s the foot soldiers who wield pikes. And then there’s the bugs who are much larger and can take a lot more damage. You will face two types of each enemy; normal and hard versions. The hard versions of the baddies are red and they can have extra attacks like shooting fireballs or they can be harder to kill. On some levels there are even land mines, so watch where your running. There’s also a boss you encounter on the last level! We wanted to add a few more enemies but we just didn’t have time. Some things we though about were a rolling land mine that would roll around the perimeter of the level and then explode, flinging shrapnel all around the level. I made some sprites for stationary turrets that could be place in the corners or the middle of the map and follow the player’s movements. We also thought about making a mine layer robot which would move very slowly around the level and occasionally lay mines to obstruct the player’s movements.
There’s also a fairly wide range of pickups in the game. Again, we didn’t get to add all of them but I’m happy with what we did get in there. There are three types of projectile weapons; normal gun, spread gun, missile launcher. Your default and starting weapon is the normal gun which fires small round pellets at a decent rate of fire. It has infinite ammo so you don’t have to worry about being weaponless. The spread gun fires a stream of 3 pellet projectiles in a V-shaped pattern. It does a little more damage than the normal gun and it can take on large waves of enemies quite well. The missile launcher fires large rocket-propelled explosives which can cut through multiple enemies at once. It does heavy damage so be sure to grab it when you see one! Some weapons we didn’t get to add were the grenade launcher and the laser gun. The grenade launcher was going to work a little differently than the one from Smash TV; it would fire a large, round grenade which could bounce off of the walls until it hit a baddie or it’s fuse ran out. The laser gun was going to shoot a steady stream of energy. In effect you would have been able to ‘wipe’ away baddies with the laser gun :p There are also numerous power-ups. There’s a shield powerup, 1-up, speed-up, and a nuke. The sheild power-up is pretty self-explaintory; it gives you the shield that you spawn with for a limited amount of time (it won’t protect you from projectiles or mines though). The 1-up is self-explanatory. The speed-up will increase the moving speed of the player for a limited amount of time. And the nuke kills all of the enemies that are on the screen (but not bosses!). Aaand there’s also pickups which increase your money which range from stacks of cash to diamonds!
Unfortunately we didn’t get to do a lot of things. Besides the above, we wanted to create our own room graphic. But due to lack of time we had to rip the one from Smash TV. We also wanted to give the player more angles to shoot instead of just 8 (we we’re thinking 32 would be alot better). But due to lack of time we couldn’t do a lot of what we wanted 
For a week’s worth of work though, I think we did an exemplary job. Hopefully it’s fun!