As you may have noticed it's not February anymore. It is, in fact, many many months after February. I've not abandoned the jam, the project is, as far as the jam is concerned, finished. The final week was dedicated entirely to game content and pretty visuals.
First step for that was UV mapping. I hate UV mapping, but this one didn't go too badly. At least in Blender it tends to go more painlessly if you unwrap small portions of a model at a time. The default unwrapping behavior tends to produce awful maps when working with non organic models like, well, everything in this game. Here's the result; you can also see the final explosion artwork here.
In order to keep the amount of effort necessary to a minimum I tried to keep the art using a very simple style with big blocks of simple colors. By having the object be relatively shiny the models appear less flat. You can also see the arena is partially textured here.
The most important part of any bullet hell game! (well, besides cool patterns and good mechanics) High score table! Input is arcade-style. Select a letter, push it, and it's added to the name.
The final pieces of work to complete were UI polishing and getting the enemies to look nice. Since the enemies were deliberately made of simple cubes put together this simply meant making some decent looking materials and assigning them to the enemy models. Since I forgot to take screenshots of the final jam build I'll put up a couple shots from shortly after the jam.
And the title screen. In the original build this was against a plain black background.
Overall both me and my partner in crime were pretty satisfied with this one. Though we didn't win any "prizes" during demo day I feel this project was a pretty solid success since we managed to throw together a pretty solid FPS. The game's not been released yet due to a lack of content and some unpolished aspects. I'd like us to have a full set of six levels before release. It's also still too easy to get killed in an unfair way which I'd like to reduce. I've already got some simple additions to put into the game to make things fairer but they'll be for later devlogs.
Some Guesstimated Stats
- Days in development - About 25 days
- Hours per day - About 2 - 4 hours of work a day
- Total development time - About 80 hours