I was a little bit confused on where to start the devlog and I thought devlogs where gonna be written through blog posts so I sort of made one introducing both myself and this project. So I’ll just reiterate some of the stuff I wrote there, and here is a link to the post if you want to read it.
Game Description
You play as the titular, Light Speed Gunner, and hunt down different mercenaries and criminals for bounty in a classic arcade platformer gameplay.
Title screen of the game for now, I’m planning on improving it
Gameplay
The gameplay structure is basically similar to Megaman where you select a level and each one has their own unique bosses.
Level select of the game
4 different levels of the game I made so far
Tools used
- Unity 2d for the game
- Piskel and GraphicsGale for the art and animations.
- LMMS and Audacity for the audio
The project so far is still rough around the edges, I planned it to initially only have 4 levels since I’m not confident I can do more whilst also dealing with college and the levels are still a bit short but here are a couple things that I’ve made so far:
- initial version of the 4 levels with background, lighting, and boss
- title screen
- game over screen
- level select screen
I naively thought I could finish this in 1-2 years due to its small scale but even the smallest things in game development can take a lot of time. Here’s a couple of things that I’ve still yet to add in my project:
- Sound - I already made and added some sound effects like footsteps and gunshots but the themes for the levels and the menus are still to be composed. I made a couple of attempts in creating a synthwave theme for the level select screen but it just didn’t sound like an actual theme so I’m planning to ask a friend to compose probably most, if not all of the music once my project is already almost like an actual game.
- Game Intro - I also plan on having some sort of cinematic intro for the game, something like in those old arcade games like “Streets of Rage” or “Sunset Riders” which plays when nobody is playing the game yet basically what “Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon” is doing in its intro. It’s something that I would like to try and it also sets the tone of the game.
- Points System - I wasn’t really planning to add a point system at first since I didn’t really think it would matter, from my experience playing those classic games, all that mattered to me was just clearing the levels and I didn’t really care about the score but a friend of mine recommended adding points and I realized it sort of makes sense because it gives the game a little bit of replayability. Competitive players can repeat levels to see if they can get a higher score from their previous runs by looking for alternative paths or secrets. Additionally, points are also the norm in the old arcade games which this project is definitely inspired by.
- Player Progression - as of now, the progression of the player is not really saved. Once you finish a certain level, the game sort of stops there as I still have to find out how to code the player’s progress and make sure they can’t select a finished level. I also want the game to reset after 3 game overs, similar to the SNES version of “Sunset Riders”, to make it more challenging and I feel like unlimited continues makes the “game over” less impactful. I am currently working on this one I just finished the art and animations for the level completed screen in the level select. I just gotta implement it.
- Game Difficulty - Speaking of challenging, I’m having second thoughts on making the game as “classic” as I can since when I let a couple of my friends test the game they had trouble with its difficulty and I’m still not experienced enough to determine whether it’s just my level design or it’s them not used to the old style of games where you really need to repeat multiple times and get used to the controls to overcome the difficulty. I ended up slowing the projectiles for the enemies, again a la “Sunset Riders” but I think it just disrupts the flow of the game since unlike “Sunset Riders”, the player can dash and easily dodge the projectiles. So yeah, I still have to tweak the game and find the right difficulty.
- Game Settings - this is something I have no idea how to execute so I still need to study this one.
- Improve Sprite arts - There are a couple of sprites and backgrounds that I am not happy with so I plan on improving and giving more life to them.
- Clean Code - I’ve been developing this game while also looking up Unity tutorials so I’m sort of learning and practicing at the same time and I realized how inefficient some of my early codes are and I’ve still yet to clean them.
So I think that’s all for the current status of the game and the future plans, I aim to continuously write my updates here in this thread until I finish the project. Comments and feedbacks are appreciated!