Friday, 28 August 2015

Arrow Game's First Post!


Arrow Game is a small project I've been working on for a few weeks now, currently with programmer art. It is meant to be fast paced, with each wave of enemies intended to be a quick 'burst' of shooting. It is made with C#/Unity.

Concept: You have 7 shooting stations which enemies are trying to assault. Shoot them before they get to you, or you'll lose health and they will eventually escape. If five escape, you lose. Different modes bring different challenges and styles, such as arcade mode, a sprint from wave 1 to as far as you go, or level select, where you try and get the highest possible rank on each level.

I've decided to share what's happening with it as it's made. It may be fun to look back on this record after development is finished, and see how far it's come. I have no concrete plans for it as such, but by the time it is finished I may go ahead and release it primarily as a F2P mobile game. I'm considering adding desktop support, but from experience the game plays a lot better on (and was designed for) mobile, or computers with touch screens.

Arcade
 

Nukes

Additions since starting;
- Arcade mode runs indefinitely until 5 enemies escape in a single wave.
- Barracks is laid out and all perks [so far] equip and perform correctly.
- Addition of nukes to clear screen. Limited to arcade mode only, and 3 per try.
- Three separate types of enemy
- 'Self destruct' perk will send a 'combo bullet', hitting everything on screen for one damage and increasing the combo count, when one of the weapon stations reaches 0 health.
- Hitting enemies in combo zone increases your current combo, racking up points much quicker

Next up is the level select screen. I have a design for it (below) which I will go ahead and create before next week. As soon as I have this in place, I can start working on the rating criteria for each level. I am thinking of going ahead with simple scores for now; 100 for bronze, 200 for silver, 300 for gold, that kind of thing. The barracks plan seemed to work seamlessly as I was creating it, so I'm expecting the level select screen to end up pretty close to what I have below.

I don't do much pen on paper planning, instead opting to go with the program-it-and-see-what-happens route. Usually that works, but I think for UI elements, or any real artistic vision, it helps to get a general idea before you start throwing around numbers and objects. So I made some quick mock ups of the barracks/level select. I'll leave you with these and make an update post next week.

Barracks

Level Select