Spinruss an entry to the Boss-Rush-Jam 2025

I want to talk a little bit about the dev process, ideas, solutions and stuff related to the creation of this entry.

But be warned, its the first time I am writing a devlog so things may not be perfect.

The beginning

To be quiet honest the jam was not on my schedule but a friend of me asked me about ideas for a theme related to "spin" and so I came to know about the jam.

When I was much younger then today I spend quiet a lot of money on the arcade "Gyruss" (if you don't know it, that's fine) it is basically a shoot'em up that uses a fake depth instead of an planar playfield where the player actually rotates around the screen. 

I wanted to do something along this lines for a long time and the theme just brought it back to my attention and it does sound like it matches the theme quiet well, right?

If you want to know how the original looks like, feel free to search for it, there are plenty of videos out there. 

The name

The name is arguably not that great, the intention is a bit of a nod towards the original game.

The start

I was late but I think I can manage getting something done in the given time frame. I am usually more into dungeon crawlers (see my entries to the Dungeon Crawler Jam 23&24) but I do have some experience using Unity3d and software dev in general. However in order to learn something new  I going to Unity 6 along with the new input system and the URP pipeline. The new input system will hopefully allow me to use controllers along with keyboard and mouse. URP is kind of new to me and I wonder what challenges await me.

On the other hand I do own a rather large collection of Unity assets and two seam particular suited to get things done (I am more of a coder then a pixel pusher) and being a solo dev this seems like a pragmatic approach.

https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/vehicles/space/the-big-spaceship-builde... 

Let's you build ship using a modular "Lego" like approach. Yes it is kind of limited in one way or the other but it appears good enough. I got that as part of a large bundle a while ago.

https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/vfx/particles/sci-fi-arsenal-60519

Comes with some nice VFX that seems perfect and was also part of another bundle a while back.

Creating the cover image

Visibility seems to have an huge impact on most people. I am no exception to this and if you are not willing to put at least a minimum of work into the itch page, why should I even bother to d/l your game? Yes, sure may sound harsh but to face the truth, this jam will likely have more than 500 entries and a rating periode of only a week. If I am optimistic, I am going to rate maybe up to 100, it highly depends on my sparetime. So if you do not have a good cover image I am very likely to pass on game. It still may be a great game but it will sufer from a missing/bad cover image.

Since the jam rule do not allow AI generated content I went to the old fashioned way by setting up a special scene inside of Unity. It may take some practise and while it is still not perfect this is what it looks like inside the Unity Editor:

In order to make it shine a little more I went ludacris with the lighting and added a fat bloom on top of it. You do not want to do this inside a game but for a still-image you can do wild stuff.

The rendered image than looks like this:

Actually you will use the fighter model inside the game and the station is going to be the final boss (if I have enough time to finish it).

Creating the logo

Of course we need to add the name of the game to the cover image. I recommend using https://www.textstudio.com/ they have a large collection of fonts and effects you can use. A lot is free to use if you add an attribuition link to there site.

For the SpinRuss logo I used this one: https://www.textstudio.com/logo/silver-text-effect-2302

Just make sure that you select the transparent background and export it as transparent png file. Then you can use Gimp (or any other image editing software to combine the logo and the cover image and your are done, except that you have to rescale it afterwards to match the requirements of Itch.IO.

That is how I created the cover image. Did not take to long.