Hi, welcome to a LONG overdue update on my game development journey.
Life Updates
The reason I haven’t made an update for the past few months was because I didn’t make any games, casually or for school, during that time. But for the past few weeks, I have learnt a lot about Unity from my Game Programming classes, and even made a game called Aru’s Toys with my classmates in a game jam, so expect to see more about those, and upcoming projects being added to this blog.
Also, the reason I didn’t write blogs was because I didn’t enjoy writing them. However, an indie game developer and also Youtuber, known as DevDuck, has inspired me to start making blogs again to show you about cool things I’m doing in my games, even for those that aren’t tech-savvy enough to understand them, or for those that are too tech-savvy and feel that my codes can be improved in multiple ways. I realise now that my thought processes when making games can be entertaining, and can benefit both the reader and myself. Thus, I will try to continue to write blogs, no matter how boring they may seem, as developing games isn’t just about the game, but also the journey.
Anyhoo, time to get to…
The Real Blog
For our assignment in Game Programming, we were instructed to make a 2D game in Unity. That’s it. We had all the freedom to develop ANY type of game we choose. This freedom was amazing yet it was daunting at the same time, because even though we could make any game, we SHOULD make the best game possible, at least that’s how I think, even though we are nowhere near 100% knowledgeable on Unity yet. What I came up with, was still quite ambitious, even though I didn’t want to put too much pressure and expectations on myself.
My favourite game as a kid
When I was 6, my brother & I would spend most of my ‘computer time’ playing Alien Shooter, an isometric top down shooter that features a male or female protagonist using increasingly powerful weapons to kill aliens in a lab in the bloodiest way possible. I loved this game so much, that I actually downloaded the game to replay it last year for nostalgic purposes.
Anyway, I figured a top down shooter would be enough of a challenge for me, while not being too difficult. However, I have never made an isometric game before, and couldn’t wrap my head around how to layout an isometric map.
A different time, a different type of shooter
In the end, I figured that instead of doing an isometric top down shooter, I would do it completely 2D. This was partly inspired by Zombs Royale, a 2D top down shooter battle royale, a game that a friend recommended to me, and I remember how impressed I was when I first played it.
And thus, Zombie Shooter was born.
With this idea set in stone, I was incredibly motivated to start working on it, even though the game is an assignment that is due in December. In fact, I was so motivated, that I worked for 3 days straight so far on the game, with enough food and sleep, of course.
Square One
If you have read my previous blogposts, you would know that I can’t draw anything impressive out of nothing. So every game project starts with me looking for art assets on OpenGameArt.org.
After a few minutes of searching, I found some very impressive assets that would fit incredibly in my game, for various reasons.
Tileset:
At first, I was questioning where my game would take place, as it could be anywhere I wanted to, given that it was under a Zombie Apocalypse setting. However, upon discovering this tileset, I immediately knew it would be perfect, as it somewhat resembled the lab in Alien Shooter, while having its own distinct look.
Characters:
My original idea was to have character assets from a sideview perspective, much like the video below, and have the character’s hands and weapons move towards the cursor. However, finding the assets above made that part completely unnecessary, as I can just rotate the whole character relative to the cursor. It also came with a zombie asset, which was helpful as I wasn’t entirely sure if my enemies HAD to be zombies at time. The player asset also included assets with weapons, which I originally planned to add on my own. And, it included animations, Honestly, this asset has everything. Couldn’t ask for more.
Crosshair:
No top-down shooter is complete without a crosshair.
I originally only wanted a dot crosshair, however, upon reading the description of the crosshairs, I realised that I could switch crosshairs depending on which weapon the player equipped, which would be a neat touch to my game when the player switched weapons.
Roadmaps
Another thing I learned from DevDuck was to use Trello, to write down ideas and features to I want to implement into the game, which I found was a problem when I developed previous games, where I would waste time trying to remember what feature to add next.
With that, I made my own roadmap on Trello. Here’s how it looks like:
Expect to see more about every feature listed above.
I would love to go more into detail about the development process, but I’ll save that for another time. Thanks for reading.
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