Created by: Polly
Pixel Planet Generator by Deep Fold
Music by: Chris Logsdon
Tested by: John, Rhete, and Iffy

For such a simple game, it took Planet Attrition a while to finally materialize.

This game's initial early premise was shared with John and Rhete on January 22nd, 2024, and it was an entirely different kind of game when I initially pitched it. I actually managed to salvage the original design graphic I made!

Yeah, past Polly...Keepin' it real simple there...

Not only was it originally intended to be a game where you evacuated as many inhabitants from the planet as possible, but it was also tied to the ASDF/Synchro Red and Blue gimmick I've been featuring in my games for ages. And with this original design, the game was intended to eventually be able to be beaten! Definitely a bit less dire of a premise than the "The End" theming the game would take on as the idea evolved.

I wanted to do a mouse-only game now. That was kind of the big point here, I think. A lot of my games up to this point were keyboard intensive in some way or were gamepad compatible, so I wanted to use just the mouse to try and make something simple, but with mechanics that fed into one another well.

Unfortunately, I never really got too far into actually working on this version of the game, so there's nothing to show from it, but the idea of enemies swarming in on a little planet that sat in the middle of the screen while you used your mouse to destroy them absolutely stuck with me.

Though the evacuee idea never saw any kind of implementation or prototyping, I did create an early concept of enemies swarming a planet just to get that idea down. I often sketch out ideas like this in GameMaker, even if they never lead to finished games, because I like just having little ideas around I can play with or pull into other projects.

This sketch would be saved as Intense Circles, named after the circles that move erratically around the perimeter of the screen and spawn enemies at random.

Download Intense Circles (2.35MB)
Hold Left Click to shoot.
Press Right Click to bomb.

Spiders? Before they were spiders, they were just red dots that moved toward the planet. Again, it was just a sketch, but the more I played with it, the more I could see little spiders skittering toward the planet instead of spaceships or anything of the sort. So, I doodled a quick spider sprite (minus skittering for the moment), and voila! Spooderians!

The final little detail I'd work in is that once an enemy has come into contact with the planet, its animation speed will increase and the sprite will begin to shrink. This was meant to kinda get across the idea that the spooder was digging into the planet. It also doubles as a sort of "last chance" mechanic, since spooders can still be destroyed as they're burrowing into the planet. It's only about 5-10 frames (I think each new spooder type introduced has a slightly faster burrow rate) but you can have many close calls and keep things going, and I think it feels neat when you're able to pull off saves like that.

This would be where the idea would sit for most of the year. I always kept coming back to it in my mind, though. Not so much the planetary evacuation idea. I let that go pretty quickly, I think. That said, I think that idea does have legs, and I may even revisit it someday. I still really liked this smaller idea, though, so I held onto it.

The game did have one minor control change. For a while, the player had to hold the left mouse button to shoot, and use the right mouse button to deploy bombs, but that really didn't make much sense since there's no point where you'd wanna stop firing in this game.

As can also be seen from the early prototype, the bomb was implemented from the beginning. Rather than recharging over time like ASDF 2's laser, Planet Attrition's bomb initially requires 10 enemies to be dispatched to be deployed, which increases by three every time it's used. I wanted to balance this enough so that you get to use a lot of bombs (because it feels fun blowing up lotsa stuff at once!), but the game's ever-increasing intensity would reward strategic hoarding of bombs, too.

At one point the bomb could also damage the planet, but that was only for a very brief period where the planet had a life bar.

I'm pretty sure I started working on the game in earnest after the US elections of 2024 just to keep my mind off things. (Funny that I chose to work on a game whose theme is literally, "fight until you literally can't fight any more," but I assumre you that was entirely coincidental.) Once I started in on it, the game came together fairly quickly. I had a demo build out to John and Rhete on November 17th and had already put together the game's logo and itch.io site, so I really tore through this one, which is something that just tends to happen when I get hyperfocused during gamedev.

Speaking of the logo, I'm actually pretty happy with how this one turned out. The angular font was one I'd briefly considered for ASDF 2's logo. When I added the red accents and the subtitle it just really popped for me. I am by no means a designer so this thing could just be trash, but I think it's probably my best one.

Oh yeah, y'all have Rhete to blame for the secret joke logo that the game can sometimes start with...

The only thing the game really needed was a good solid progression and balance. I used the same techniques I'd used for the ASDF games to get a feel for this one's tempo, added different colored spooders that moved at faster speeds, and programmed the game's overall pace to increase at regular intervals, and that was all that needed to be done.

Once I was finished with the game part of the game, I liked what I had, but I didn't entirely love it yet. The thing that took the longest was finding just the right music to suit the game's speed and atmosphere.

I spent a whole afternoon digging through known artists I'd used before, looking for songs to rip out of old games, and scouring YouTube and Newgrounds portals for something to use but kept coming up empty. On a whim, I decided to check out community member Chris L's Spotify Page and rooted around for a bit until I eventually found the tune that'd come to be what made this game complete. A song simply titled, "Some Beat."

I really connected with how the start of the song is so sparse, almost helping paint the image of a quiet lonely planet experiencing its final moments, and then the beat kicks in and it's kicking ass till you can't any more. The second this tune was in and I tested it the first time, I went from liking to loving this game.

It also made the game's trailer pop! I don't really put much time or thought into trailers for my games but I ended up really liking Planet Attrition's trailer a lot!

Despite the fact that this game started with a completely different concept, I couldn't be happier with how it turned out. I think it's a good example of how scaling down a bigger idea can still leave a lot of really tasty meat on the bone.

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