Beach Defend 2000 is a turret shooter heavily inspired by Beachhead 2000, but with a few “twists”. It was my entry for So Bad It’s Good Jam 2019, where it took third place. I followed a similar formula to last time, building solid core gameplay and then ruining it with awful graphics and sound. This time, I also added a fake microtransaction mechanic which makes the game almost unplayable without cheats. Between waves, the player has the opportunity to buy ammo, health, and upgrades with ingame or premium currency.
The theme was retro, so I shot for a late-90s to early-2000s junkware aesthetic. I used a mix of 2D and 3D graphics, mostly low-res/low-poly and some with limited palettes. I also added CD audio support, done in an extremely hacky way (it involves a complete copy of VLC). I even added a non-functional setup program, exit screen, and fake crack to complete the impression. Like most of my games, it’s full of little jokes, references, and quirks.
Like STARFURY, Beach Defend 2000 was built using Unity and the CommonCore framework I’m developing for Ascension III and other games. That made it easy to tack functionality on, and gave me a lot of quality-of-life features like menus, save/load, and debugging out of the box. In fact, I never explicitly implemented saving for this game, and it wasn’t supposed to have it, but when enabled it just worked.
Finally, I went into So Bad It’s Good Jam 2019 with the intent of spending less time than I did the previous year. That did not happen. I might have spent even longer on Beach Defend 2000 than I did on Tactical Weapons And Tactics. Even still, there was some stuff that didn’t make it in.