About Doom Zone

Doom Zone is a top down shooter with Smash TV reminiscenses (360º aim & shoot, power ups, traps, great number of enemies, etc) solo and multiplayer oriented.

Nothing too complicated to achieve with 2 persons and 72 hours, or that is what we thougt.

 

The Team:

• Jonay Rosales González: Programmer, Game Design and character modelling.
• Esciron: 3D Props, Textures and Music/SFX

 

Idea’s Birth:

having in count the LD’s theme, our Idea was kinda simple (maybe too simple?), but effective:

1. Visuals: having in count both of us aren’t kinda good at 2D art (my last LD entry: Three Rude Dudes should confirm it, or maybe the opposite). We tried to simulate Playstation (PSX) visual with some post process effects (Real time  shadows, deferred rendering and bloom). The visual results on projectiles and different particle effects are kinda good. The overall scenario and character aren’t too detailed due to camera’s distance. So it was easy put dozens of enemies and elements on screen.
2. Presentation: we wanted to show all the stuff in only one screen in the best way possible: Transition between the main menu and the game should be kick-ass, telling the player “Is Time To kick asses, NOW”
3.  Multiplayer: until 4 players locally can play the game, but seems the implementation wasn’t too good (See what went wrong for more info).
4. Music: My LD’s pal, Esciron is good at electronic music, SFX and all that stuff, so by instance we can have for Doom Zone a really good soundtrack.
5. GamePlay: simple as pie: kill al enemies and return to the platform to start another wave, until game over is showned. we made 6 levels on this LD that spawns randomly. Our level generator can add more levels easily and without much haste.
6. Enemies: 3 types of enemies.
   1. Kamikazes, the ones that blow aways with near you.
   2. Snipers go around the scenario, stops, aims and shoots you.
   3. Trappers: put mines and shoot their rocket launcher at you.
7. Traps: 3 types of traps.
   1. Turret: shoot missiles at you.
   2. Laser beams: when activates, all that touches is destroyed.
   3. Fire traps, spits fire when opened.
8. Items:
   1. 3 weapons:
      1. normal,
      2. spread gun
      3. rocket launcher.
   2. Invincibility: you’re untouchable during 5 seconds.
   3. YEEXplosion: a brutal explosion that kills all on the scenario.
   4. Life Up: you know what does.
   5. Bonus: gives you 5000 points.

DAY ONE (Visual development):

1. Creating characters: 4 characters with polycount < 300
2. Creating props: main scenario, traps, etc
3. Creating proyectiles
4. Adding character animation set-up
5. basic gameplay coding

DAY TWO(Code development):

1. Creating GUI Elements
2. Making OST, voices and SFX
3. Coding ALL gameplay

DAY THREE (Last Day):

1. Code Game Flow (in-game, main menu, pause and game over logic)
2. last art and music additions
3. adding levels
4. debugging (few hours before submission) and crossing fingers

 

What went right:

• Visuals:
  • Old school look with a little bit of HD effects enchancement achieved nicely
  • transition between main menu to game/game over to main menu sensation is really great
• Gampelay:
  • enemy behaves as they must
  • sensation of killing enemies is cool
  • great variety of items
  • different situations

What went wrong:

• we haven’t much time to debug. Maybe we’ve added too much stuff for a 72h entry
• Bizzare way to select controller/join players pressing a button on main menu
• characters are hard to see when there are lots of enemies on screen. even worse on some scenarios
• bad art choices due to the few amount of time.
• 80% of the in-game bugs derived on a plugin for make enemies break into pieces.

 

The Future:

The game is in a state that we can polish, improve and convert it into a more interesting game. So is a matter of time we launch a post-compo version of this game Soon.

You can play and rate Doom Zone Here

Itchy Games Twitter: @ItchyGames

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Tags: ld31, ldjam, postmortem