So... I Made a Game Called Shoot-a Story

Quick set-up: In June, a started making a game called 'Shoot-a Story', which is, to put it simply, a Space Invaders-esque game where you shoot at classic literature. Oh, and everything in made out of text. And you can destroy the menus. I started out doing short update blogs, which can be found on Tumblr, but very quickly I stopped doing the posts and instead just kept working on the game. This post is pretty much a sum up of everything I did since the last post.

So… Shoot-a Story. That was a thing. In fact, it still is a thing. A finished, playable, out-now on multiple platforms thing.

In my last update, over two months ago (!!!), the game had one level, one font, basic menus and no game over screen. Now, the completed version has:

• Controller support
• Five different levels from classic literature
• Three different fonts to play the game in
• A custom level mode (GameJolt only)
• Kevin MacLeod Music
• Leaderboards (GameJolt only)

I haven’t worked on the game non-stop over the last two months, but I'm happy with where the game has ended up. It’s playable, unique, bug-free and, most importantly, fun to play.

If you want to play, it can be found and played for free in the following places:

• GameJolt
• Kongregate
• itch.io
• Google Play
• Amazon App Store

So, what now for Shoot-a Story? Well, not much, really. I've made Windows 8, Windows Phone 8 and PlayStation Mobile versions, to see if the game still worked on those platforms. They do, but alas I'm unlikely to release the game on those platforms any time soon.

Further updates to the game are unlikely, but I’ll fix any bugs if they arise and add new levels if enough people request them. Part of me would love to create a version that worked with chat from a Twitch channel, but I don’t think I'm going to get the time for that any time soon. I'm also willing to create custom versions of the game for people if they ask (Giant Bomb Classic Quote Edition, maybe?), as in theory that wouldn't take that long to set up.

Thanks to everyone who’s played the game over the past couple months, and thanks for all the feedback I've gotten over the time. One day, likely in a few months from now, I’ll likely doing some sort of post-mortem, so people can find out what the numbers are really like for a free game that’s had no advertising outside of the odd tweet. For now, if you’ll excuse me, I've got some Hamlet monologues to go shoot at…

I wish I could figure how to get Unity Web Player to stop throwing a fit, but the version I managed to grab on my Android phone is a neat little entertainer. Solid work!

@dark_lord_spam: Don't use Chrome. Unity Web Player is Chrome's only weakness. Just open it in Firefox.

Nice, thanks for sharing. I totally suck at it though, haha. It reminds me of Silent Conversation (that old flash game where you jump around in literature text).

@dark_lord_spam: Maybe you had the same problem I was having (on Chrome), you have to click the small icon with a little red X on the right side of the URL bar and allow plug-ins.

@audiobusting: @development: Thanks for the advice, y'all.

Thanks to everyone who found this (what I'd thought was forgotten) post and played the game! Not that the numbers are huge, but you can likely imagine my surprise when I decided to check my Google Play download numbers and found that I'd had the same amount of downloads in one day compared to what I'd got over the previous month combined.