This is the last blog post of the project and today is also the end of the project. We had a playing section for each group to present their game and I’m glad lots of participants loves our game. Especially good comment from the teacher: “Aetherial by Devuourer. Nice overall theming. From the start with the map and how you can see parts of the environment marked out that you will pass by later in the game. And of course a satisfying boss battle at the end that challenged every aspects of your abilities. And actually having to pick up the chest that was marked on the map. ”
As a programmer perspective, the game kinda successes as a shoot’em up game. We have diverse kinds of functional enemies and a challenging boss fight. In general, it reached my standard and expectation of a decent project, though we encountered several problems during the process which frustrated me some times.
We experienced the entire process of game-making and I remember every details clearly. It’s really important to link your academic knowledge to actual practice. I don’t have the programming teacher to tell me what to do this time, at most the cases I need to figure things out by myself if I met some technical problems. Google is a good teacher, it taught me the ability to solve problems individually. Though it’s what programmers suppose to do, it’s still hard when the group come up with some crazy idea that you don’t know how to achieve. It gives me confidence while saying :”It’s not hard to implement this at all” instead of “I have no idea how to do that, can we change it to something else?”.
The main issue our group have is the time limitation. Though I consider we were pretty productive already, we were still over ambitious. The blue print of the boss fight was huge at first: it has different stages, it has diverse weak points to shoot and enraged when has low health points. Until two weeks before Beta, we still haven’t settle the specific behaviors of the boss. As a result, we have to cut it down to a mini boss which made us all disappointed. Fortunately, it didn’t block our step to move forward, we tried our best to make everything working and it does.
Here are some things i learn from the process: 1. For a shoot em up game, it’s really good to have diverse difficulty to different level of players. It’s really hard to make a level suitable for casual players and hardcore players. 2.An excellent level of 5 minutes makes the game more attractive than a normal level of 10 minutes. As long as player can make use of all mechanic to experience the level it’s enough instead of a slow and redundant difficulty curve. 3. It’s good to have an event that player can interact with to end the game (In this case: a chest to pick up), it works better than a cut scene to make player immersed into the game.
In the end, i would like to appreciate the efforts the whole group made. Especially, I would like to thank our project manager, you are a reliable project manager who links the group together and an umbrella which protected us. Anyway, I learned a lot and gained a lot and I enjoy the time working as group Devourer.
Some screen shot:
Hangning_Devourer 