TechnoPhage is a top down isometric post-apocalyptic sci fi role playing game, that takes place on a post-apocalyptic world where the player must survive outside the city walls. Outside the safety of the walls lie an unforgiving wasteland, filled with wild beasts, bandits and the TechnoPhage a Nano-virus that changes any biological matter that is touches into a creature to further spread the virus and remove any threat that it spreads.
The main Aim or goal of this project was to learn more advanced game mechanics such as line of sight with if time permitted changing with different light levels. A dynamitic lighting system with if time permitted day/night cycle. and a dice based melee combat system and a way to stop attack spamming.
During the first weeks of development it was going well as i was getting through about one advanced game machinic a week which was my original intention. Since the project was going well I left the project few a weeks to work on anther major project and help people who weren’t going so well with there’s. This was not great time management as I ended up leaving the project alone for about two weeks. Spending about an afternoon to fix the project up and have something nice to show. The lesson we would start user testing I discovered that the game had not saved correctly on the USB. Some of the sprites where stretched and quite terrible to look at with broken hit boxes. But that was a small problem compared to the code that was broken. Most of the bandit AI was broken I was only got the health to work before having to redo nearly all of the player code as that was the code that had changed the pervious night.
But that’s not saying I did not learn nothing from this project. I had actually learned a lot from the project such as more advanced understanding of game maker language, sprite work and working on a much larger game project and the time management of a project. I had also done nearly everything I wanted to achieve in this project even thou it broke at the end. While I’m not super proud of what the final project ended as because I know I can do much better I’m still going to stick by it mainly what I learnt from it.
During the development of the game I discovered I few ways to do dynamic lighting and line of sight. The first dynamic light system I used was the game maker tutorial one but discovered that it was extremely system intensive. With a little research I came across a another way of doing the dynamic light system that was far less system intensive and still looked alright.
If I had more time to do the project I would tear the project down to its very core then build it back up to getting it to fix many of the problems within the core code and make the code have a more unified style and comments to allow me to quickly read what each part of the code does. But if I was given the chance to restart the project I would change my approach to it. One of the first things I did in the game was build dynamic lighting without truly building the core mechanics up fully. After getting the dynamic lighting working I kept working on more advanced and more advanced mechanics that eventually did not work well because the core of the game was not there to support the rest of the game.
