Polishing a t*rd, or: How I Learned to Stop Making New Games and Improve my Existing Ones Vol. 1

Having made a few projects with Unity, I had become comfortable with my skill levels and was confident that I could make any small game i wanted. The Dead of Night took 2 weeks to put together. After I had finished I started 5 projects. I was spoilt for choice as to which one to continue.

However I have decided to revisit this project and improve it too a five star project.

Too start I listed all the things I wanted to include in the Dead of Night. I added all the suggestions I’ve had from players and testers. I then looked at it from a design point of view and tried to judge what changes I could make to increase return players and play time.

I came up with this list:

1. increase feedback from enemies (sounds when hit, health-bars, etc)

2 . Increase variety of enemies and add boss rounds.

1. A story mode.
2. More weapons and increased detail within them (reloading, ammo, etc)
3. Increase player feedback with global high-scores, achievements and increasable stats.
4. More Accessibility (downloads, mobile versions, etc)

This week I have been working on the first point. I’ve added a health system to the enemies and fixed a bug which meant the zombies would appear when out of view range.

It was a challenge to get the U.I. health bar to disappear when out of range of the players field of view. In the end I ran a small sub-routine which calculated if the zombie was in view and then displayed it’s health bar if it returned true. My reasoning being, unlike the enemy, a partially visible health-bar wouldn’t enhance the game experience. The health-bar should be either visible or not.