Hey guys, I hope your playing and rating is going well. I've seen some really awesome games out there, I really wish I could play them all. I wanted to take some time to write up a post mortem, for posterity. If you want to play the game first here' a shortcut there: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/mage-arena

Summary of the game :

This time around I worked on this a game called Mage: Arena. I set out to make an FPS game with Doom-esque sprite based graphics. As for the theme I took a little liberty and interpreted it as "The more you use, the worse it is". So in my game you play as a fire mage who wields intense fire magic that will hurt them if over used. You manage this with a mechanic called "cooling off" in which you cannot sprint or use your magic but your usage level will go down.

What I did differently this time

This time I approached the game with some more knowledge about C# and Unity, as well as experience gained at work over the year. I made more use of the languages features that I wasn't using before; Interfaces, abstract classes, type parameters, delegates and actions, lambda functions, etc. This made designing systems easier as I made a custom input system to assign inputs in the editor and a Finite State Machine controller that used ScriptableObjects and inheretance to define the states(Unity tutorials gave me the idea).I also brought more in Unity engine knowledge. I had been practicing with Blender for a bit and wanted to use that for the sprite animations. It worked out pretty well once I got the hang of it.

Consequences

Working on all of those systems took a lot of time, and while the investment was worth it for the more manageable code, it led to *MANY* features being cut. I wanted way more enemy types and spells, also sounds... sounds would have been nice.

Conclusion

At the end of the day I made a game, and I got some new custom plugins for my future projects. The source code for the game is available on github, I'm currently still working on it to add some enemy types and fix bugs. I think the project has potential so I'm going to continue it for a bit and see where it goes. Anyways, if you read all of this rambling and it helped let me know. Thanks for reading!

If a little behind the scenes of this development interests you, I post updates for these types of things here: https://twitter.com/mactinite