Postmortem

Developer Notes: This is my first game I ever considered finished and uploaded. This project took about 4 weeks to do. I've made mental notes through-out my time making this game as I wanted to share my thoughts on my own game. I thought it would be cool to see a developer's full thoughts on their game, along with images on concept art and whatnot. These notes will explore the programming and art side of the game. If you're interested in reading more, I hope you enjoy reading it. Thanks for playing my game, and I welcome any constructive criticism.  Notes on the Game Design: At first, I had a very broad idea of how the game would turn out. My inspiration for this game would be the side-scrolling bullet hell games played in the arcades. I wanted to try adding the 3D element into the genre and see what makes of it. I didn't know how the game-play will be like when the side-scrolling aspect is gone as the player has the ability to freely roam around the level.   When I got the player and enemies made, I had to really think about the enemies will interact with the player, along with the level design.  I had to remember about how enemies fire their bullets in the 2D bullet-hells and translate it to the 3D realm. I always thought bullet patterns were so cool because of the flow that comes with it as it forces the players to move along the patterns. I tried to emulated these bullet patterns and add variety with the enemies.

The level design for the first level was really linear. The player just goes forward to go through the level except for the beginning where I hid the weapons upgrade, another feature taken from the 2D bullet-hells.

Looking from a bird's eye view, the level looks like a chicken drumstick.

Notes on the Art: Initially, I was to make the player be a robot and able to transform into a plane that had different properties, but sadly I never did it. I just kept it a plane while the enemies were these mechanical robots? When I was doing the concept designs, I tried to have all the enemies be a certain themed. I drew based on shapes, humans, and animals. Considering that the theme could be anything, I went out of the box for a cool theme. I ended up making the enemies based on a cone shape. This made the modeling really easy because of the symmetry.

Notes on the Music and SFX: I have no experience with music/SFX. I don't know how to make music, so I used Chrome Music Lab for making the background music. The music was just trial and error. For the SFX, I thought it was funny to make the sounds with my mouth and just using Audacity to put effects on it. The blaster's SFX was okay, but the explosion SFX was very last minute. I was contemplating on even having it in.

Notes on the Programing: When I started making the game, I kept everything very simple. I initially had the player have movement and shoot, without any booster, shield, and weapons upgrade. The enemies could not shoot in sprinkler pattern or even have the triple shoot. The enemies could only face the player and shoot. When I got the level into the game, that's when I started to really think about how to make the enemies attack. I worked with a box and used it as a test dummy. Programming the "shotgun" blast turrets was easy, but giving the "foot solider" the sprinkler effect was hard because I gave it the ability to move. The "foot" solider was rotating to face the player, but I wanted it to shoot in a sprinkler motion. I made the movement as a parent and gave the shooting part as a child gameobject. Meaning, the "foot solider" could move and the "gun' part of it can rotate without moving the parent. I still had some trouble, but I ended up make the "foot solider" shoot in a sprinkler motion until the player got close enough so it would chase the player. I did this so that the player would not easily rush through the level. I took this concept and gave it to the boss's AI. The boss has a random number generator and if the number would be less than 30 and after X number of seconds passed, the boss would go into another phase.

The "Phase 1b" is when the boss would stop and shoot out missiles that chases the player.  I wish I thought of something more creative with the different phases.

In the last part of making of the game, making the player move between scenes was a problem for me. I needed the player to have its health and weapons upgrade when moving into the boss level, so I had to do the "Do not Destroy" function. When I had to restart the level or go back into the main menu, I didn't know how to make the player "deactivate" when back into the main menu. I solved this by making a script to destroy the player and UI system when restarting the level or going to the main menu.