Games like Audiosurf and Beat Hazard do this, so it is definitely possible. Whether or not I have the skills to make it happen is another thing all together. At the moment I am still trying to get the basic systems down for the game to work off.

edit:



Pretty much done adding the basics of the customization system between levels. Also thought a bit about advanced gameplay. At the moment players are awarded additional statpoints to level up if they save score or money between levels. The score they keep between levels is also added to the total score pool, which would give a better highscore at the end of the game. I've also added a fire velocity upgrade after this video. It should also be noted that the first short thing it goes to after starting a new game is a debug level that awards a large amount of score. I also uploaded a new version if anyone wants to test it out, download link is in the opening post.

edit: Fixed annoying small bug with Swivel Machine Guns

edit edit: Fixed bug with hitboxes being active before they were meant to

Also, PEW PEWS

So, in order to get my game on for NANY2014 I decided to get cracking and learn some programming. To do this, I decided to make a game using Löve2D. Löve2D is a framework that allows you to build 2d games fairly quickly using Lua. Since Lua pretty much is the only language I've had a bit of experience with it seemed like a good place to start.

Anyhow, the purpose of this thread is to chronicle the progress on this training project. Since I haven't really saved any versions yet (I plan to when I've hit some milestone, like getting the basics down) I will start from my current build and work my way forward with each new post, explaining what I've done and possibly what went wrong. With this I can look back at what I made and hopefully learn more than I did while doing it. Anyhow, lets get on with it.

These first few videos are from the early stages when I wasn't really doing much but trying to set up the basic framework to build my game on.





This video showcases projectiles and an enemy. Both were terribly done as I had mocked about in a stupid way with all the rotation and positions of the entities, this was later fixed. Even though the effect is minimal, it's always nice to do things the right way.





Gave the projectiles sprites and added different effects to the game. Including the randomly placed twinkling stars in the background.





This is where the fun begins, I changed the actual firing of projectiles from being hardcoded into the playership into objects that can be attached in arbitrary number to the ship. This way I can have powerups and upgrades without going through too many hoops. I also added some damage indication to the enemy ships as well as more stats to calculate damage. In the second video I got sound working and added some temporary sounds to the game, I don't own the rights to the music though and I plan to change it to something I can legally use later, so far it serves as a placeholder however.




In case you want to try it out, the latest compiled version can be found here. I have no idea what is needed to run it, but from what I gather it runs best under either windows 7 or 8.

Controls are the arrow keys for movement, space for shooting and p for pause

Updates:
Update1
Update2

I recently watched The Prestige, wasn't sure what to expect walking into it. But it was both clever and at some places slightly funny. The twist in it was also really interesting and a bit surreal. But it all works really well and I'd say it's a must see.