So! This version of the game is finished, and here comes the postmortem.

This was a wild week of working on this game. I originally set out to try and make something like Journey of the Prarie King (see first devlog) but because of both my tendency to scope creep and also time constraints, I ended up making something like a really lite version of Nuclear Throne

ok my game is not and never will be as cool as Nuclear Throne for a very long time

But yeah! My goals and overall core gameloop didn't change all too much throughout development. I still wanted that challenge and sense of power (see previous post) and the core gameloop was still mostly "dodge enemies and shoot them"; the major change being that I discarded the powerup system to systematically power up the player for their performance

And honstly? things went pretty well!

From playtesting, the game felt good, with challenge lingering throughout the game with the satisfaction of turing a revolver into a machine gun (at least for me) as well as my spritework working very well with the game (I was a little afraid that having only 2 directions would make the game look bad)

The tiling of the walls, although they look fine, was a bit of a disaster in that I wanted to set up a tileset system but couldnt figure it out in time and ended up manually panstakingly adding a bunch of wall objects and setting their sprite manually. On top of that I still wish I had more time to implement more features that plays into giving the player a better sense of power.

I do wish I knew how to work with TimeScale better so that I could add things like hitpause (game slowing down/freezing when getting hit to add more impact) and also how to add screenshake, better vfx, etc... But things still worked out in the end

This project definitely taught me how to code general game frameworks a lot better! Compared to my previous assignment, there was definitely a lot more optimization in reducing the workload of coding this, as well as making animation trees less of a nightmare to work with.