DEVLOG - HOLE ME NOT

Finally done with my game "Hole me not"! Here's the link if anyone is interested: https://christianhess94.itch.io/hole-me-not

The description sums the game up pretty well so I won't waste time citing the mechanics of it here.

So, without further a-do here's the experience of building "Hole me not" for the Brackeys game jam:

Day one - Sunday - Brainstorming - 02/23/2020

So I wake up at around 8am and in my timezone the theme had been unveiled about 3 hours prior. Most of the day was me brainstorming a lot of ideas on what could be done in the given time and what funcionalities.

When deciding the main core of the gameplay I decided to put a twist in the game: 

"The only way to win is to make the game harder on purpose"

With this idea set in my mind I created the project and in the end decided to hand draw all the graphics as I had to sell my drawing tablet a couple of months back.

Day two - Monday - Core gameplay - 02/17/2020

Here I started the actual programming. I made the camera teleport to the position of the player via the Update method and used Brackey's tutorial on top down shooters to make the player face the mouse. When the mouse is clicked a translate force is applied to the player in the Vector3.up direction.

After that I made the scripts that controlled the number of holes, or lives, the player had and the shooting mechanics. I didn't want to make a conventional shoot'em up game so I decided to make the first two weapons shoot sideways so that there's some of a learning curve to aiming properly.

Day three -Tuesday - Graphics - 02/18/2020

This was a very graphic intense day. I pretty much spent all night after work drawing the enemies, projectiles, explosions, etc. 

This is also when I made the player graphic as before I was using a free add-on from the asset store. 

When I started hand drawing the graphics my mind jumped directly into the Fancy Pants Adventure game and how the graphics look like they are hand drawn.

So, I decided to make this my style of choice and created each frame of all the animations with a slight difference so that the objects would have a crude form of animation. 

This is really easy and made possible for me to make all the animations of the game in the span of 3 or so hours.

Sprites for the enemies and core game mechanics

Sprite sheet for the player. Ended up scraping the destroyed version

Day four - Wednesday - Enemies, Difficulty System and Upgrades - 02/19/2020

I made the enemies spawn around the player outside the view of the camera, but I noticed that it was too easy to out-run them. So I made a couple of spawn points that are always in front of the player to encourage the player to move around instead of only going in a straight line.

Up to this point there was only the basic alien type that chased the player and that wasn't really fun.

I created the ranged alien and added the shooting mechanic for when the player is a certain distance from the alien. 

After some play testing I realized that one of the most OP things was bunching all the aliens and shooting them all at once.

Because of that I created the tank alien that destroys the bullet when it touches it (it also dies in the process) and made them the most common spawn in the game.

I then decided to add a difficulty system. Basically the game gets harder the longer you play. you earn less credits per second and the spawn rate of enemies is increased.

I also started implementing the upgrades which are realted to the weapons' fire rate and bullet speed.

Day five- Thrusday- Menus, Sound and boost- 02/20/2020

This was a really uneventful day. I scoured the internet for some music and SFX to add to the game. I did try to create my own using Bosca Ceoil and my keyboard but I didn't believe there would be enough time.

Again, Brackey's video helped me a lot here. Made some tweaks to the gameplay mechanics and that was about it.

I also created the boost mechanic here. Press Space and the moveSpeed for the player is doubled for two seconds and there is a five second cooldown.

Day five- Friday- Color, UI improvements and release- 02/21/2020

So I knew that I had to put the game out today as I won't be able to work on it tomorrow. I made changes to the UI to help the player see the information they need without taking their eyes from the enemies for too long.

These improvements were:

• The button to open the upgrade menu was U, then it became M but eventually I settled on E as it keeps the hand near the A S D keys for shooting
• I added the A S D graphics to signalize which direction the player would shoot upon pressing the corresponding button
• The boost indicator was in the bottom part of the screen. I moved it and all the rest of the UI near the player which is where I noted was the place I spent most of the time looking. 
• After that I added the rotating effect to the boost text:
  • Basically it's a child to the Player object and snaps a couple of units to the Vector.up of the player object.
  • Then i inserted a script that keep the rotation of the Text the same as the camera

This is also where I colored the alien's spritesheet

After some play testing, I created game's icon, built it, sent it to a couple of friends, got some feedback, adjusted some stuff , rebuilt it and uploaded it here for the final time.

Final considerations

With the time I had at hand I do believe I made an enjoyable game. All of my friends enjoyed the difficulty of the game but never felt too overwhelmed. I felt this aswell as this is not an easy game to win but it's possible to win anyways. I've beaten the game about 5 times to date .

I do hope people enjoy it and that I get some good feedback on it.

I'll gladly answer any questions about the whole process. Thanks for reading!