Successes

A large success was the ability of our group to work together. Everyone communicated well and presented the work on schedule. We were able to decide on group decisions without any conflict and everyone always responded in a timely manner. Each member joined group meetings when one was necessary as well.

Another success of our game was bringing about the vision that we had. We were able to bring about the Metroid vibes and play style in our own way and make a fun game to play. The movement was properly implemented and complimented the level designs well. Each enemy was capable of patrolling their own platforms, dying when shot, and was able to attack the player. The artwork was cohesive, mixed well, and created an atmosphere that was in line with our vision for the game.

Overall this game was really fun to make and we all had a blast.

Challenges

While there were successes we also faced challenges along the way.

One of the challenges we faced was with the moving platforms and how the player interacted with them. We had to make the platforms move to intended locations and their movement speed was slow enough for the player to jump on, but also fast enough to provide players a challenge to time their jumps. Also we had to add in a script to make sure that when the player jumped onto the platform it didn’t just slide right off like it was during a lot of play testing. 

Another challenge we faced was our UI and button controls. There were a lot of issues with the buttons especially when it came to implementing wall jumping and double jumping. We had to make sure that during the appropriate moments our game could differentiate between a wall jump and a regular jump and at times this would conflict. We also had to fix our UI to implement these changes as at times it got really overwhelming with the amount of buttons and sprites we had on screen.

Another challenge was the player movement in general. There were times where it felt like the player was moving too fast or jumping too high almost as if he was floating in the air. We had to make sure to adjust our speeds in our scripts for a smooth gameplay movement. We also had issues with our wall jumping as there were times where it would not work at all or it felt really off when wall jumping because the player at times would be stuck in the animation for it forever.

Another key challenge was just programming in general. As more features were added, bugs would follow. Refining our game to resolve bugs definitely took longer than expected, and was a large aspect of our final development process.

What We Learned

While building this game, we learned how to make sprites, animation, expansive level design, and mobile design. Besides mobile design all the other skills were ones we had learned before, however we were able to further develop upon those skills to make sure our game was a lot more refined and had smoother gameplay. We also learned more cinematic techniques that allowed us to envelop our game in that Metroid feeling. In terms of Mobile Development we learned a lot when it came to the UI and implementing a joystick and buttons so that our game felt just like any other mobile shooting game. We also learned how to scale things properly to size for mobile gameplay through the different unity settings. Overall, creating this game helped us learn a lot more about Unity, its tools, and how to properly develop a game from start to finish.

Future Revisions

For future revisions we plan to have more enemy types added into our game. Although there are already two enemy types excluding the boss within the game, we always have room to be more creative with our enemies and create new ones that add to our game. We also plan on adding more to the enemy AI so that the enemies have more movements and actions within the game to add to the gameplay/difficulty. With Necroid Dread we introduced the idea of armor upgrades and within our future revisions we hope to expand upon this by adding more special abilities with our armor upgrades and adding different skins for our player within each upgrade. Last but not least we also hope to add more levels within our games and new boss levels. In doing so we can keep building upon the story of our game and make it longer so that players can enjoy the story and gameplay more.