Why must you stop shooting and save the animals? Well, as the game’s about page explains:
If the demo that was available at MAGFest is any indication, the frantic gameplay matches the tone of the story perfectly.
We spoke with Dr. Spacezoo creator Jesse Ozog about the game, its inspiration, the challenges of development, and reducing space animals to grease and gibs.
ZN: What first gave you the idea for Dr. Spacezoo?
After finishing the Indie Quilt game jam, I went on to make a few other game prototypes. A few months later I came back to Dr. Spacezoo and decided that I would spend the next 2 years on making Dr. Spacezoo awesome!
ZN: What was your biggest inspiration for the story and the gameplay style?
ZN: Why did you decide to go with procedurally generated levels?
The colors represent the level’s difficulty flow, which is very important. I spend a lot of time making subtle tweaks to the difficulty flow to ensure the procedurally generated levels remain fun.
Another reason for using procedurally generated levels is to allow for procedurally generated daily challenges. Every day, each player gets one chance to beat the procedurally generated daily challenge level. I really like the idea of each player getting one chance to show their skill in topping the daily leaderboard on a level nobody has seen before.
Making a good procedural level generator takes a lot more work than making a set of hand-made levels. I’m constantly tweaking the procedural level generation, difficulty flow, enemy type/placement, etc. as I work on other aspects of the game. I wrote up an overview article for the procedural level generation in Dr. Spacezoo if you would like to read more.
In addition to procedurally generating the levels, all of the stars and planets in Dr. Spacezoo are procedurally generated. Originally, I wanted to have about 50 unique planets and stars for the game, but the art requirements for creating them all were really high. Since I’m a better programmer than artist, I made a star and planet generator that creates a unique set of stars and planets for each mission based on the player’s name. Also, I try to post an interesting procedurally generated planet once a day to Twitter.
ZN: What has been your biggest challenge so far in putting Dr. Spacezoo together?
ZN: What’s your favorite thing about the game?
ZN: Is there anything else you’d like our readers to know about Dr. Spacezoo?
Whether you save the space animals or reduce them to grease and gibs is your call, you monster!
Dr. Spacezoo will be on Steam Early Access in March/April. More details about the game can be found on its website.
