Oh hey.
So I made
a game. You have probably not heard of it, but that's okay because it's not very good. And I'm okay with it not being very good because I made it from scratch in 7 days for the
Experimental Gameplay Project. Since then there's been some interest in it (keyword: some), and I always intended to go back to it at some point, so that is what I'm doing. (Also, the ghost/makers thing is postponed until after the holidays, and I thought it'd help me concentrate on that better if I worked on something else for a bit).
You can play the EGP version at the link above. Based on a number of people playing it and criticising it (which is incredibly useful, by the way) I'm going to outline the main problems with it, as well as
my current or intended fix:-This error shows up when you die:
___________________________________________
ERROR in
action number 1
of Draw Event
for object oCursor:
Error in code at line 9:
if oControl.vNight=0 && oPlrtop.vEquip=0
^
at position 34: Unknown variable vEquip
This is due to oPlrtop being destroyed, so oCursor has nowhere to get vEquip from. I already fixed it by adding a line of code checking whether oPlrtop exists. It's a mistake I'm frankly embarrassed to have made.- It's hard to know things like when you're being hurt, or what items you are getting out of chests.
These are examples of nice things I had to forget about in order to get it done in time. I'll be telegraphing damage better and there'll be text coming out of the chests to tell you what you got.- It's small. Too small. My eyes hurt from staring at your teensy tiny videogame.
Right now you can resize the window, which kind of solves this. The problem being that it looks blurry as fuck, which kind of ruins my lovely pixel art. I'll be working on a 2x option later, but right now I'm concentrating on more abstract design fixes.- It's too easy because:
- There's no incentive to kill enemies; just bunker up for the night and wait.
- There's too much health.
Two birds with one stone: Chests no longer give out health, and health pickups are dropped by enemies. Secondly, there's now a limit to your HP. Finally, there's now 'the money gun', which will exchange HP for certain things (more on that in a minute). - Barricades only disappear at dawn, which removes any tension of them failing during the night.
Barricades aren't solid until you purchase them with the money gun. Then their health can be upgraded with it. Their HP will wear down over time, so there's every chance that they'll fail during the night (which might make bunkering down more interesting). This isn't implemented yet, but hopefully it'll make for some nice risk/reward.- The Map is a bit boring - visually, mechanically and in terms of design.
The map was the last thing I designed, and I designed it on-the-go as I was making it. Also, I suck at designing maps. That being said, I will be trying harder in future: there will be 3 different areas, and they're probably going to be much smaller than the current one. They'll also look nicer.This is a mock-up, featuring some of the gameplay changes I want to make:
Here are some test screenshots since I've been working on it again:
Will be updating on my progress in this topic if anyone cares.
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