Catching up
This project started when I decided to spend November making a game. The game would be a first-person shooter in the style of the 90’s classics Doom and Quake, for a handful of reasons. Check out November 1st’s article for more details on these decisions, and my initial thoughts on the project’s direction. One week of progress determined that building everything around a central rhythm beating in time with the background music was a feasible approach, though doing so certainly brought its own challenges. For more details on how we got there, give November 8th’s article a glance. The next step was to figure out what I wanted to include in the game, begin the process of programming everything so that I could test it, and eventually, invite others to test it. For more details on what I wanted to include and why, take a minute to read November 15th’s article. From there, I took everything I created and used it to build a rough draft of a level, more details about which can be found in November 22nd’s article. After constructing the level, I began playtesting and making changes based on my experiences and constructed some very basic menus, both of which I expanded upon in November 29th’s article. Which brings us to today.
So what have we got?
A name! For the time being, I'm calling this game Crescendo, though as is the case with most things in game development, this is not the final name and may be subject to change.
More importantly however, there’s a playable demo! Go give it a try! No really, you can download and play Crescendo as it stands right now here:
Once you’ve made your way through the level, there is a button that will take you to a survey where you can provide feedback on the demo. ‘Why do you want my feedback when this is one month into a one month project’, you ask? Because I want to keep working on Crescendo, and eventually provide a more complete experience than I was able to create in a single month.
New This Week
The early parts of this week were spent adding a few more last minute features, including a volume slider, level progress bar, and sound effects.
Volume Slider
Adding a volume slider was a more involved process than I thought it would be, and it’s still a bit more finicky than I would like. But for a game so focused on sounds, having a volume slider seemed like a really good idea though, so it was well worth the trouble.
Song Progress Bar
I added a progress bar to the player’s display, so that the player roughly knows how much time remains in the song. This helps balance the time limit players have to complete the level with their need to explore to find the secrets hidden throughout.
Sound Effects
The final major thing I added was gunshot sounds that play when their respective weapon is fired. These sound effects are a key part to making the weapon feel satisfying to fire and can also tell the player important information. Each weapon having a unique sound effect means that weapons can be identified without glancing at the weapon’s sprite or the UI, which can be very useful during heated combat. These sound effects are also currently the bane of my existence.
There’s one effect these weapon sounds have on the game that I did not originally intend however. It turns out that there’s a bug in Unreal Engine 4.26: the version that I spent all month working in. After repeatedly playing sound effects, a tiny delay is created in between when the sound effect is triggered and when it actually begins playing. Each time a sound effect is played, this delay is increased. For a game focused on rhythm and actions happening in-time with the music, a bug like this is catastrophic. I spent a ton of time and energy this week on trying to find a workaround for this bug, but so far to no avail.
A One Month Post-Mortem
From a programming standpoint, I was able to code most of the base gameplay that I wanted to create, including some very basic artificial intelligence; a system that I had no prior experience creating with. For most of the bugs I encountered, I was able to figure out what was causing them and find a solution to restore the desired behaviors. Even when some systems that I had taken for granted (such as that accursed volume slider) surprised me with the amount of effort they required to work, I was able to overcome these unexpected speed bumps to produce the functional assets necessary. For this aspect of game development, I’m definitely happy with the results of this past month.
On the game design front, there’s a lot of decisions I can reflect on. At its core, I’m still a big fan of the rhythm-based first person shooter I envisioned early on. The weapons provide a reasonable variety of ways to interact with the combat encounters, though there is certainly some overlap, and the weapons may feel a little too run-of-the-mill. There certainly aren’t enough enemy types to fill out a full game, but for a single level, I think the enemies provide enough variety to construct the few encounters the level needs. As people fill out the survey I included with the demo, I’ll have a better idea of how these decisions are affecting people’s gameplay. But for the moment, I’m happy with the decisions I’ve made so far, considering that I had to create anything I designed.
The audio and visual aspects of this took a lot more effort than I expected, as you may have noticed from the large number of missing audio and visual assets in the game; there are a lot more colored squares and Microsoft Paint stick figures than I had originally envisioned including. In short, I definitely underestimated the amount of effort I needed to put into these areas. I definitely bit off more than I could chew on this front, and paid the price for it in this “final” product. Considering how much effort I had to put into the other areas of development to get this demo to where it is now, I can understand how the visual assets fell from my radar, especially given my personal tendency to prioritize function over form.
Overall, I’m really pleased with what I was able to accomplish. In a one-month timespan, I was able to put together a playable demo of a game from scratch. Throughout, I was mostly able to avoid expanding this demo into something I would not be able to make in a month, which was a real concern of mine going into this project. I’m looking forward to seeing where this project takes me in the coming months, though I won’t be able to make it the priority that it has been these last few weeks.
With that in mind, I’ll likely be mostly taking a break from developing Crescendo for the next month as the holidays ramp up, other real-life responsibilities demand my time, and survey results come in. I’ll also be returning to analyzing UX and game design decisions all around the industry for the next several weeks, but expect to occasionally hear updates on how Crescendo is coming along. It’s been a crazy November, but I’m thrilled you all chose to come for this ride with me.
In the meantime, spread some cheer of your own, and I’ll see you next week!
-Mark