For the ones who read my earlier journal entries, it's been a heck of a ride
The final/ 1.0 release can be found here:
http://www.crealysm.com/games/booh_setup.exe
Since the 2nd beta build, I've made quite some changes.
By head:
- new animation for game over, instead of a cold screen switch to the leaderboard
- added a new 6th/ last level
- small improvements on level design
- collision detection improved
- menu options expanded, sound/music now can be disabled if the user gets annoyed by the looping music
- balanced the game, especially the differences between difficulty levels
In the end I can say I'm proud of the end result and hope lots of players will have fun with it. I've just played the full game in Easy mode, where I've done about 1 and a half level from first person view. And not to sound narcistic, but I really enjoyed it.
Enough about all the good things, what did I learn?
- design of the game would have been different, if I thought about 'timing'/ timesteps earlier (with/ without v-sync). Maybe use some sort of grid instead of realtime AABB collision detections, although the chosen approach ofcourse helps in first person/ 3d view
- the GDD really helped me out during development of the game, it's a living document and was only finished about an hour ago when I released the game
- it's good to think ahead before just start coding and modelling, development because of this, went pretty smooth
- keep to your game's core features and don't get lost in new shiney ideas, which will eventually prevent you from finishing a nice game (of course you can tweak the features/ game design along the way, but keep to your base plan and mission).
For who's interested, the GDD can be downloaded here:
http://www.crealysm.com/other/BooH%20-%20Game%20design%20document%20-%20final.pdf
My next projects have sort-off already started, I'll be working on:
- learning D3D11, already finished the 1st (math) chapters of the Frank D Luna book, now starting with d3d initialization
- building an asset viewer and start setting up my own Asset Pipeline, for now using the current engine (with d3d9).
While doing this, I'll improve on the engine and make some preparations for moving to d3d11. Not sure yet if I'll 'just start over' or refactor, start over is also an emotional thing, since I've started with the engine in 2006.....
I hope you've enjoyed reading my frequent updates during my journey to finally release 'BooH'.
My best friend's gonna work on a simple website where I'll post the game, together with my 1st game (Asteroidz). In the future the site will expand with new games and nice demo's/ screenshots.
Have fun all and remember, finish stuff and don't get lost in to difficult details
Well done! I am one of the many who get caught up with the new shiny features and have yet to fully produce a game. I think I will take a similar route to you and maybe complete an old school arcade game to get something released :).
Once again congratz!