Well since the work week has started my progress will slow down quite a bit. Luckily I just need to add one more power up to be feature complete.

Oh wow haha, that'll do it! I do stuff like that all the time. I come back to my code the next day and I'm like "What the hell was I thinking?!"

and now i'm sitting here puzzling at why it's so hard to make a doom clone in unity because putting a bunch of textured boxes about causes it to run incredibly slowly

How much is a bunch? I've got 100 cubes running around in my game without any problems.

Today I:
-Got some music tracks from PostPre and put them in game. Also put in a system that slows and distorts the tracks in a way that creates a sense of building tension.
-Added a new enemy that explodes when shot, killing both the nearby players and enemies. It's super fun chaining them up and taking out a bunch of cubes
-Added lasers that fire down from the sky, killing both players and enemies. You get a second of warning before it appears to get out of the way. It's pretty cool when they set off chains of bombs.
-A new pickup for the player that destroys any nearby enemies.

I would like to see a slow-paced shooter that put more emphasis on long-term strategy, tactics, and planning, rather than the short micro-clusterfuck-bursts of engagements that exist in most shooters today. Sort of like a Chess of Shooters.

Isn't that Frozen Synapse?

Today I added the spider sense, jump power up, score, and a ranged enemy. Tomorrow is more power ups and one more enemy type.

I got the basic gameplay and time-slowing mechanic up and running:



When you're not moving, time is reduced by 90% but you can mouselook as normal. The player is almost always surrounded, so it makes checking behind you much easier, which is important because you can only take 1 hit. Tomorrow I'm going to add a "spider sense," where the environment is tinted slightly red when an enemy is close enough to attack.

Peeps on twitter liked that one more too. I think they both can be built on the same base framework so I'm going to go for the time one first and see what kind of gameplay I can get out of it. The other will be my fallback.

Oh, just had another idea: time only moves forward while the player is moving. Perhaps the player can get a power up that allows them to move without time advancing occasionally.

Which do you guys think would be more fun and/or interesting?

I think I'm going to take a week off of Dungeon Hearts and give this a shot. I'm thinking of a "survive as long as possible against hordes of enemies" type gameplay where the player's gun gains XP and levels up. Each time it levels up a random property of the gun is improved, such as bullet size/speed/reload, number of bullets, etc. So the player has to adapt their playing style as the properties of the weapon change over time.  Stretch goals include:
- Random level generation
- Option to disable the randomization of properties so the player can choose at level up
- Color-based gameplay, i.e. blue bullets do double damage to blue enemies but half damage to everything else

Visuals will be abstract, flat shaded 3d objects.

That shooter looked pretty cool!

don't mean to derail but...
would you recommend this from the networking perspective? like, in my case it'd be more about meeting some artists to work with more than learning about unity, which I already do day-to-day.

Networking is probably what it's best for. I think the crowd was mostly programmers when I went, but there were some artists there.

I went to the very first one and had a great time. It can be tough to learn and retain information in such a chaotic environment though. Cool people and cool projects make for lots of distractions.

I'm sad to see this go unfinished as well. Hopefully some will take away from this the importance of being aware of the size/scope of the project overall.

Those are some cool looking environments! 

In-progress work on one of the later environments:

Dungeon Hearts is on Touch Arcade!

Huzzah!

Here is the finished version of the environment I posted previously:



I'm considering switching from red lava to a green or purple glowing substance so it doesn't clash with the fighter, but I'm saving that till all the other environments are done.

Thanks guys