So I finally finished one!  Huzzah!

This time around, I decided to shoot low and add on if I had time.  I didn’t like the theme (again) so I had trouble coming up with anything I could do.  I ended up with a pretty generic sidescroll shooter that was way too hard.  Since ‘way too hard’ was the only thing it had going for it, I let that stay rather than ‘fix’ it.

It worked out really well to get the firing working first, and then work on movement.  Then hitpoints and death.  Mock up a couple levels and the game works…  This was done by about the end of the first day.

I didn’t spend as much time on it the second day as I could have.  I was already feeling a bit burnt out, and I had to work today.  So I added health bars and finished out the level design, and designated 2 enemies as bosses and gave them more health and a different color.  Then I fleshed out the menu systems and level changes, and the ending screen.

Then I went to Disney World.  No, literally.  lol  I needed to get out of the house and regain some sanity.  Had this step not been necessary, I would have added pickups for upgrading the gun, and possibly some kind of rocket launcher for some of the enemies, to give them a different weapon.

The graphics bothered me the whole time, but I simply haven’t got the skill to have done anything worthwhile in the time allotted, so I didn’t even try.

My tools let me down a bit.  I was trying to use the beta version of a Unity asset, and it screwed up.  I was originally going to use it to make the characters, levels, etc, instead of just generic boxes.  Would have looked somewhat better, and given me more options for the levels.  I tried to remove it and go back to an old version, but I couldn’t remember how to *use* the old version.  lol  Oh well.

Other than that, the tools were great.  Unity was obviously used for the game, NGUI for the menus and healthbars, and I used Photoshop for the art for the menus/healthbars.  I also used SFXR for the gunshot sound.  And BMFont with a free font.  Since I had used all of those before, there were no surprises and it all went smoothly.

Next time, I think I’ll shoot a bit higher.  I’m going to spend more time thinking about the theme and designing the game, and then more time programming as well.  I’ll be taking a day off work to make sure I’m not crowded there, either.  I think I’ll spend some time these 4 months working on a few things that I didn’t know enough about to implement, like cutscenes and pop-up conversations during the game.  I think I’ll also spend time with Blender and Substance Designer and learn to make basic models quickly, and animate them.  I think that would have improved the look and feel significantly.