Beach Defend 2000 is my entry to So Bad It’s Good Jam this year. It’s a turret shooter inspired by Beachhead 2000, Gunner, and other similar games of the late 90s and early 2000s. The modifier this year was retro, so I tried to emulate the style of a “value software” shovelware game of the period. I also added fake microtransactions, to make it extra bad.
Honestly, I feel like last year’s entry was a stronger one. It just doesn’t have the weirdness of Tactical Weapons and Tactics, and with both a parody of modern Pay-To-Win mechanics and actual support for CD audio it feels awkwardly incoherent. The general mechanics, however, are solid enough that I’m considering actually making a decent game out of this.
This is the second jam game I’ve built using Unity and my CommonCore framework. There’s definitely room for improvement- I had to make some tweaks, hacks, and changes- but it was a positive experience overall. The biggest upshot is that a lot of quality of life stuff- menus, debug console, scene management, even save/load- just works. It makes for a slightly nicer final product but most importantly makes development and debugging a lot easier. It didn’t stop me from spending way more time on this than I was supposed to, though!
You can grab Beach Defend 2000 here.