I first released this game through Newgrounds, those poor souls, but for some strange reason it got a much more positive reception than I anticipated. They also made a lot of great suggestions that I have since incorporated into the game.

In this final update I added a storyline intro of sorts. Also added were satallites that can easily cause a ruckus by bouncing off the asteroids, making the field more dynamic (and shows off the billiard-ball-style physics I put into Flixel). I also added space storms that will cause a static overlay to appear, making things more difficult to see (if you run through them). So be sure to avoid those, even though they don’t damage your ship. So click the damn image below to play it already

Or read on if you already have and wish to know how I made TLE and why I decided on certain mechanics and concepts. I’ll start with the obvious–art direction.

Aesthetics

No one–and I mean NO ONE–knew about or even noticed the unique style I used. They thought it was nice-looking, sure, but they did not notice that, unlike other Flixel games, I did NOT scale up the graphics for that pixelated look. I got the pixelation by putting them through a filter in Photoshop. I then manually drew a heavy pixel border around every solid asset (backgrounds/effects/etc do not have any). Lastly I added a heavy drop shadow for everything, giving it all a flat “fake depth”, as if everything was made out of cardboard and kind of laying on top of everything else. I didn’t achieve this effect as well as I wanted–too subtle.
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