Robocolypse
Title: Robocolypse
Release: July 2018
Original Development Year: 2014
Development Period: 3-4 Months
Development Status: Completed
Availability: PC
Tagline: Survive the Robot Apocalypse!
Release: July 2018
Original Development Year: 2014
Development Period: 3-4 Months
Development Status: Completed
Availability: PC
Tagline: Survive the Robot Apocalypse!
Robocolypse is the first game I ever developed and my inexperience as a programmer, game designer, and artist definitely looking back on it. The project was ambitious considering I was learning programming while creating it but I was determined to make a top-down shooter against a horde of enemies with purchasable weapons and upgrades.
The player was more or less a green circle with a face and eyes. From the top-down perspective this makes absolutely no sense and I remember messing around with it trying to figure out how it should look but eventually just settled on the easiest to draw option. Moving and aiming were done first, then I moved on to figuring how to make my character shoot projectiles. Funnily enough the experience of figuring out how to get him to reload his weapon humbled me quite a bit. Something as intricate as that in real live boils down to setting one variable equal to the value of another in code: I thought it was neat but then again I'm a nerd.
The player was more or less a green circle with a face and eyes. From the top-down perspective this makes absolutely no sense and I remember messing around with it trying to figure out how it should look but eventually just settled on the easiest to draw option. Moving and aiming were done first, then I moved on to figuring how to make my character shoot projectiles. Funnily enough the experience of figuring out how to get him to reload his weapon humbled me quite a bit. Something as intricate as that in real live boils down to setting one variable equal to the value of another in code: I thought it was neat but then again I'm a nerd.
Choosing robots as the enemies was a conscious choice that I made for two reasons: (1) robots are relatively easy to draw and (2) I didn't like the idea of my first game having the player kill representations of real people a.k.a a soldier--oddly something about that didn't sit with me the right way despite playing those kinds of games myself. The robots were drawn as blocks, colored grey, and had different symbols for their antennas to distinguish their different attack patterns.
The true fault of this project was how poorly everything about it was managed. My inexperience back then is clearly showcased in the design of the upgrade menu. Granted the game wasn't complete and I did have plans to connect the tree at some point but I had to explain the system to people which is never ideal: the game should do that. Aside from the buttons being well... ugly to be completely honest, there wasn't really enough player feedback or understanding for the player as to the pros and cons of their options.
The true fault of this project was how poorly everything about it was managed. My inexperience back then is clearly showcased in the design of the upgrade menu. Granted the game wasn't complete and I did have plans to connect the tree at some point but I had to explain the system to people which is never ideal: the game should do that. Aside from the buttons being well... ugly to be completely honest, there wasn't really enough player feedback or understanding for the player as to the pros and cons of their options.
To my credit certainly what it was I wanted. Additionally I had wanted the player to be able to use a wide variety of weapons and have their power levels increase. So I worked a the weapon progression system and an upgrade system to improve the weapon the player already owned by storing the values for each weapon (this was made before I knew about arrays, and they definitely would have made this particular mechanic much easier to develop). I wanted to have a progression system based on player performance which is why I added the sacred scraps: upgrade currency that was much more rare and required for getting the best upgrades. One of the objects was even dedicated to holding a comment which kept my to do list. It's a bit embarrassing to see this several years later I must admit.
Focusing purely on the mechanics, the game ended up where I wanted it to be. Waves of enemies would spawn that scaled with how far the player was getting, they had a variety of weapons to use and enemies to defeat, and there was an upgrading system. At some point I want to go back and recreate this game now that I know what inheritance and arrays are (yes, I unfortunately just copy-and-pasted a lot of the code over to different objects). Lesson learned: just because I knew what I wanted making a game that did that wouldn't be as easy.
Focusing purely on the mechanics, the game ended up where I wanted it to be. Waves of enemies would spawn that scaled with how far the player was getting, they had a variety of weapons to use and enemies to defeat, and there was an upgrading system. At some point I want to go back and recreate this game now that I know what inheritance and arrays are (yes, I unfortunately just copy-and-pasted a lot of the code over to different objects). Lesson learned: just because I knew what I wanted making a game that did that wouldn't be as easy.
Last Update: 07/04/2018