I keep shifting my days of posting, and I think I’m going to revert back to posting on Sunday and make a habit out of it. I feel like I’m not making progress fast enough, so I’m like “one more day!”, but all that does is just push my logging out while also potentially making zero progress.
In positive news, I have a build of the game! A lot of the menus aren’t entirely coded properly, so if you try to exit the game, you’ll need to press Alt+F4. Right now, you can move around, fight zombies, collect light, and level up. Tons of tweaks need to be made to make this game complete, but my initial goal of having something technically playable is complete. So this is milestone 1.
If you want to give it a shot: https://drive.google.com/file/d/11PuVCnupi40k7d912UeWmeve_I4z-7du/view?usp=drive_link
The stuff I posted as my to-do list in the the week 4 update still applies, however I have a new, more immediate list (mostly quickly jotted down notes):
- On the build version, stats aren’t kept between loads of the game – need to add a save
- Finish the menus
- Do better anchoring for position
- Redo for controller support
- Make sure all buttons work
- Fix the menu system – sometimes the wrong menu briefly pops up. No bueno!
- Rearchitect the level-up menu so it’s more intuitive
- Add a start menu
- Add in the better player character animations
- Ensure zombies don’t randomly stop moving
- Make everything look better!
- Particle effects for sucking in light
- Make the light-pickups look better
- Make your light flicker a bit?
At GDC I saw a talk where a guy talk about the most successful teams he had been on followed a process of essentially stripping the game down to its absolute core, then creating that and iterating on it until it was polished and complete. Then they would the next feature until it was complete. The thought being that if they ran out of time, they could drop the remaining features and still have something worthwhile. I’m going to try taking a similar approach, where I’ll get the current stuff working properly, then add more until it becomes what I want! The other option is to just create crappy versions of everything, then iterate on everything until it’s good. The issue I have with that is that I think it will be overwhelming seeing a huge pile of crap. My to-do list will just say “make everything better”.
Kind of Antsy 