Well you've finally reached the end of it. Thirteen long weeks of hard work, but was it worth it in the end? Probably. Definitely for the experience and learning.
Admittedly, the entire last week of development was a bit of a blur, given the amount of stuff that had to be done, but I'll do my best. As I had finished most of my mechanical implementation by the final week, a lot of my tasks had to do with polishing the game as much as I could just to make everything feel a lot better. One of the first things I did was change the original keys into levers so that the players had to toggle them manually in order to unlock the doors. They would do this by swinging their sword.
Next, I finally implemented the Bonfire, to be placed at spawn and before the boss fight. The purpose of the bonfire is to act as a "spawn point", but also to recover the player's health and healing flasks. This was very important to add especially right before the boss fight so that players had a fair chance against the boss.
Following this, after some minor bugfixes, the next major addition I made was the map. The map shows the players their general position on the map, by placing an icon over the room they are currently in. It does not track the player's exact positions because of time constraints, but it helps players navigate when before they were completely lost.
The next overhaul I did was to the tutorials. I made the game stop and show a full tutorial pop up to better teach the player about ability unlocks, describing in full what the abilities did. Before the tutorials only taught players the controls but not how to use the abilities. With this new tutorialization, it makes players less confused about their tools available.
On top of this, smaller tutorialization for movement and combat were also implemented, being simple text pop ups that taught players the basic controls. These tutorials do not stop the game as they are very simple to understand, so they disappear as soon as the player uses the control.
The last major task before fixes and polish was sounds and music. I took the sounds Matthew recorded and created some of my own for everything that was missing, and added them to the game. Every sound I made was recorded through foley in my microphone, synthesized, or remixed using stock samples from FL Studio. I made sounds for every important action the player and enemies made.
Next was music. Implementing the boss music was simple, as I just had to put in the sound file into an audio source and have it trigger during an event. For the level music, I had to get a bit more creative. This is because the music for the level is actually dynamic, and is constructed using layers of loops that turn off and on depending on the situation the player is in.
I created colliders to divide each area and assigned the music tracks required to each area. Then, in code, I would detect if the player was inside the collider, after which I would increase the volume of the assigned tracks, and decrease them if the player went below it. There are also two tracks that trigger if the player is within range of an enemy and if the player is at low health. This makes the music more than just a simple loop, it evolves as the player plays more of the game. and it creates a pretty cool effect.
From then on, I focused mostly on polish features, stuff like implementing a title screen, menu interactions, small cutscenes, and of course bugfixes. This all occurred within the last couple days of development so of course, it was a grind. But, it was finally done.
Overall, this was probably the biggest project I've ever done in my life. But, it was a good experience. I got to show off my game design and development skills, while also picking up some new ones along the way. I really wanted to get the key parts of the game over with as soon as possible, and that led to some things being easier later on in development, but of course, this is game development. Things are never easy.
If we had more time, even just a week there are so many more things I would like to do, so many bugs to fix, but with the time we had, we achieved a lot and I'm proud of the result we came up with. But, I think I'm ready to sleep once more.
The end.
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