Karly-H

[karlyhuynh]

Assignment 3 Postmortem (Core meltdown)

Heyo again, it's Karly here for the final boss fight of game dev blogs – the POSTMORTEM 💀🎮

After weeks of tweaking, coding, crying (just a little), and playtesting, our final build of Core Meltdown is LIVE. Let’s spill the space-tea on what worked and what exploded (figuratively and literally).

✨ What We’re Proud Of

Three-tier upgrade system: Extra health, boomerang shoot, bullet speed-up? YES PLEASE 🔥

Enemies with personality: Dreadnought’s laser felt like a real mini-boss moment.

Polish & UI: Our menu flow and transition scenes gave real arcade vibes.

🛠️ What We Would Improve

Clearer explanation of retreat mechanic.

More audio feedback when picking upgrades.

Add damage effects for player/enemies (next version 👀)

💡 Lessons Learned

Start testing early. Bugs pile up fast when you're spawning 10 enemies per second.

GDevelop was super useful – but communicating in a team is the real MVP.

Sometimes, the dumbest ideas (boomerang bullets) turn out to be the coolest 💫

💬 Our Players Said…

“I had no idea what I was doing but it was FUN.” “Why is the SUN chasing me?!?!” “Can I keep playing after this test ends?”

[karlyhuynh]

Assignment 3 Playtesting (Core meltdown)

Hello there! I’m back with some spicy space-chaos updates from our game: Core Meltdown! This week was PLAYTESTING TIME – which means we sat brave humans down, made them play our asteroid shoot-em-up roguelike, and watched chaos unfold 💥👾.

🧪 The Setup

We had 6 naïve players and 4 workshop classmates test our game. Each playtester got the same script to make sure the experience was fair. (Yes, we made them “think aloud” even when they were panicking mid-comet attack 😂)

We focused on:

Game flow clarity

Upgrade system understanding

Enemy difficulty

General vibes 🎵

🧠 What We Learned

People LOVED upgrades: especially the bullet speed and boomerang shoot (one player called it “a beautiful disaster”).

Retreat mechanic confused some testers: so we added more feedback cues like UI text.

Enemies = terrifying but fun: Sun’s fireballs got shout-outs for being “spicy meatballs.”

Music & visuals = chef’s kiss 🧑‍🍳💙

🧰 Changes We Made After Testing:

Improved boomerang timer (10s limit so it doesn’t break the game)

Fixed bugs where enemies spawned inside the player… awkward.

Polished retreat mechanic so players don’t feel like they’re rage-quitting when retreating.

[karlyhuynh]

Assignment 3 – Development Progress (Core meltdown)

This week was a blast — literally. 🚀 My team and I have made solid progress on our MVP for "Boom Birds," our chaotic twin-stick shooter full of feathers and fury.

We started with refining the core mechanics: the player controls a spacebird that can shoot standard bullets from two wings. After some discussion, we agreed to include three upgradeable powers in the in-game shop:

🩸 Extra Health – gives the player 1 additional life. It literally saves lives.

⚡ Bullet Speed Upgrade – turns your boring bullet into a super-speed laser.

🌀 Boomerang Shoot – yes, a bullet that comes back. Just like karma.

After implementing each, we also added cooldowns, timers, and activation keys (1, 2, 3) to trigger them — only after the player has purchased them. This gave us lots of hands-on practice with scene variables and conditional logic in GDevelop.

One of our trickiest problems? Making the boomerang shoot from both left and right cannons, and setting it to deactivate after 10 seconds. But we nailed it after some trial and error! ✌️

Next up: testing, balancing enemy spawn rates, and polishing that juicy Game Over screen. 🕹️

Stay tuned — Core meltdown is only just getting started.

[karlyhuynh]

Racing Post Mortem (Careful Car)

This is the complete game that i made from racing game, this game is also racing but I designed the cars to run a little faster and added the challenge that they need to avoid trees, sometimes coins and diamonds will appear somewhere in another lane, the more money the player wants, the more they will try to get the golds and diamonds, gold coins are 10 points, diamonds are 20 points, but once they touch other cars and trees, it will be game over. They can start over if they want.

[karlyhuynh]

Development of Careful Car

I'm using the same character that i got before, but I'm still thinking that I gonna make more kind of obstacle from the top, because if it just only cars appear it gonna be easy to get bored, so I think I gonna change like to make it randomly modify the enemies from the top, such as it can be cars or something else appear and the speed all of characters gonna be different, its can be fast and slow.

I think I gonna create coins like a reward from the road, like while they avoid enemies but player need to get coins to have a high score.

[karlyhuynh]

A New Elevator Pitch (Careful Car)

This is the game that I based on a Racing game to do, it's not quite different, but I think I gonna add some different characters to challenge the player. And I'm gonna try to let characters move smooth, and fast, to let it can avoid the other enemies. The enemies gonna move from top to bottom and it appear suddenly and the speed gonna be different all of enemies, to let player have a feeling of suspense and not bored when play.

[karlyhuynh]

Shoot Pew Pew Mortem

Hi everyone, I just edited to make it run smoothly and faster. Then I did of Game Over scene and let it play again in this game. The player will have chances to try this challenge. The player can use the mouse to turn the ship and shoot while they click the left mouse. It does not count time, so everyone will play with no rush. The edit might be messy, but I think player can have a good mood when they try this game.

[karlyhuynh]

Development

Hi, I just drew the new ship to make it more real, and still use the enemy characters that existed before, because they look like meteorites already. It has 2 lives. If it touches enemies, it will lose 1 life and disappear from the scene, but if life = 0, it's game over, but the player can start again if they click restart under the scene.

Firstly, it will appear the ship (player) will appear, then some meteorites will appear in the scene. The biggest enemy will appear first, then the player shoots and makes it disappear, and the medium-sized and small enemies will appear, and it will be more and more, so the player needs to destroy them as fast as they can.

Lives mean player has 2 chances to play, when player suddenly touch the enemies, will lose 1 chance, and if lives = 0, it will show "game over" scene, but they still can play again and return to the play scene. But this one I still need to edit and check.

[karlyhuynh]

A new Pitch of Shoot Pew Pew

This game has name Shoot Pew Pew because I based on Asteroid game to do it. It is a ship and it will shoot bullets to destroy the obstacles. Also I want obstacles are look like meteorite and that ship need to destroy them to have way to go cus obstacles are everywhere. That ship gonna has 2 lifes, if it die, player will lose and show the scene "Game over", if player wanna play again just press Restart. Big barricades are destroy by bullets and it gonna be Smaller servers of barricades. I hope that will be fun.

[karlyhuynh]

Update character (Development)

Hi everyone,

I just draw my character for my boom birds, they look quite dumb and not professional, and i try to let my character (Player) can use gun to shoot the birds, chickens, ducks which i updated. But now I'm fixing the problem that I want these enemies can drop the boms randomly, and "Player" need to avoid all of that. One game will have 10 bullets or more, and 2 lifes, and I try to draw some background to let it not too boring when player play it, such as, clouds grass.

[karlyhuynh]

My project

Hi everyone,

I just created the project, and design the screen. I tried to make the character move on the ground and then i will try to make it can shoot. I design the outside screen cus it look easy to let the character move, and i think i gonna add some rocks and trees to let it more natural. You can see that it still look simple, but i gonna edit to let birds and chickens can move around the screen. Thank you for looking this post.

[karlyhuynh]

Elevator pitch

Hi everyone, I'm going to have the assignment that I'll make a game for my unit IGB120.

my game title is Boom Birds

I gonna make a kind of shooting game, it will have some kind of birds, chickens, and ducks go around or fly in the sky, and then the player can control the character to move around to shoot the animals. If the player shoots chicken and duck will get a point and nothing happen, but when the player shoot the bird, the other birds gonna drop their poop (kind of bom) so the player need to move out of that area.

I'm still thinking about this game and will develop it more and try to make it more fun. Now I'm using the GDevelop to make this game and add funny sounds for this game.

[karlyhuynh]

Info of myself

Hi everyone, welcome to my blog, I'm an international student in QUT, and my major is Bachelor of Business and Bachelor of Game and Interactive Environments.

I want to try to develop games, so I choose this major and study here. wanna study how to create games, and study about the story, music, drawing, and technology games.

My favorite games are Pubg, Area of Valor, Hayday, Playtogether, and Animal Crossing. I hope in the future that I can create some games like these kind of games.