[Need Many Opinions] Your Favorite Way to Say "Game Over" In Your Game?

News & General Discussion
1

Hello all,

(I hope this is the right place to ask this question, since it is opinion-based and not very specific)

In my game, you die whenever you fail to dodge one of the four obstacles that comes down the map.

Which of these ways for me to say “GameOver” in my game do you prefer and would be most likely to use?

  • Have a “GameOver” scene all by itself that loads whenever the character collides with one of the obstacles? (Just type in GameOver Collider on Google and YouTube to see lots of examples of what I mean)

  • Have a UI Text that comes upon the screen and is no longer transparent whenever there is a collision? (I got this idea from the Survival Shooter game made by the Unity Team)

  • Or the GameOver screen that comes up whenever you die in Temple Run? How is this done? Is it a new scene or what? I am clueless on that but I would love to know.

So is any 1 of these ideas than the other two? Correct me if I am wrong, but I think using the first option (GameOver scene that is loaded via Application.LoadLevel) would be choppy and not smooth? Right?

If you have any prior experience with this or have another idea, post it! This is just a question for opinions on what y’all think and could me and other people who view this with. Thank you! :slight_smile:

2

Really depends on what all your Game Over involves and, which way you prefer to do it and memory constraints involved on your target device.

If it is just a “screen” or text “GAME OVER” that could be a simple sprite that is disabled until needed. Your GameManager would just handle the GameOver appearing (instantly, fading in, sliding on, whatever) and handle the GameOver state and cycling back to Title Screen.

Target device can play a part in your choice as well. Assuming there are no memory leaks moving from scene to scene this would be lighter because you could have a Title Scene, GamePlay Scene and GameOver scene and only the things needed for each of those are loaded into memory at any one time.

You could have 3 parent GameObjects in a single scene named: Title, GamePlay and GameOver. Everything needed for each of those is included below it as a child (and likely inside other GameObject “folders”). When Title Screen is active that Title gameobject is enabled, GamePlay & GameOver are disabled. When GamePlay is active GamePlay GO is enabled and Title and GameOver are disabled. When GameOver is active GameOver GO is enabled and the other two are disabled.

I’ve messed with it both ways. And for me just comes down to whatever I am in the mood to do at the moment I am doing it.

EDIT: And after reading the other answers and wondering “WTH?” I just realized this was posted in Game Design forum.

2 Likes
3

Split your design from your implementation. How do you want your game over scene to look? What is the player going to get from it? What is the goal of game over?

Here are some design examples to get you thinking.

  • Crossy Road - The game ends with a screen shot of the players death and a share button. There is a very obvious play again button. The goal is to get the player back in as quickly as possible. And the screen shot makes dying fun.
  • Civ - The game ends with a victory or defeat cut scene. Then a complicated set of stats the player can pour over. The player is given plenty of time to reflect on what went right or wrong. This game is a stats heavy one, and the game over scene is no different.
  • Return Fire - The game ends with a black screen and the skeletal face of death with his booming laugh. This lets the other player who now has an unopposed path to victory harass the looser.

So think through the purpose of game over. Are you trying to get the player back in quickly, give them time to reflect, or something else?

Once you have decided the purpose of having a game over, the actual implementation will be trivial.

Edit: The return fire game over scene. Because it was awesome.

5 Likes
4

Probably if you have a good story, you can use your Game Over to flesh out even more of your game’s setting/characters. Make them seems like a part of the story.

In persona 3, the main character’s death is seen from a third person, on where his guest (The main character) dies in his quest, and tells you lines of his demised fate.

In Fate/Extra, death will trigger another cut-scene, especially in boss battles, to show you what happened and how the main character feels when they die before he/she could learn the search for meaning of his/her journey. It also kinda tells on what happened and what will the boss do next, revealing more of the boss’s character and their intentions, and how the main character’s death will affect them.

Sometimes I killed myself in Fate/Extra just to see what the dev had there.

In Fate/Stay Night, death will send you to a tutorial, on where some character gives you tips and advice on what you should’ve done, sometimes explaining on why you dies in a humorous manner.

I literally took every death just to see what they have ready, and heck, they give us more rewards for seeing all the death scripts they have written!

Well, JRPGs are more story driven anyways, wouldn’t always apply to any game.

3 Likes
5

Question - why does the game have to be “over”?

I like the sort of Final Fantasy IV model where some sad music briefly plays possibly with a “You Died!” message…then the game just reloads your last save, putting you right back in the action.

4 Likes
6

You could just show a text in the same game scene saying “you were crushed” and then a replay button that would reload the scene. That would be easy and not requiring a new scene.

7

Okay thank you for your input! I am thinking about doing the UI method that is shown in the Survival Shooter tutorial provided by the Unity team. If that way does not do well for me, then I will tryout your method. Thank you!! :slight_smile: @GarBenjamin

1 Like
8

Wow! You just opened the floodgates for me! Thank you for much for all of your questions I should be asking myself. The purpose of my gameover scene is to state the score that the player got and to be visually appealing with a vibrant “try again” button so that they play again! So the actual implementation of my gameover scene is to get the player to play my game again. Thank you for helping me sort that out! @Kiwasi

2 Likes
9

Oh I forgot to add: Try to make the UI appear as seamless as possible as your game art. It REALLY helps the experience.

For example, you do NOT want something like this (Fallout 4)

2 Likes
10

@DroidifyDevs Thank you so much for your wisdom and for helping me out on what NOT to do. My game is nothing at all like a big FPS such as Fallout. Mine is just a simple mobile game. But nonetheless the minimal UI I have should still be seamless with my game design (as you said) and should not be too distracting from the player’s experience. One question though (If you can answer this). I just did some research on Google on “Reloading a Scene in Unity” and I read that Application.LoadLevel is now obsolete and that I should use the SceneManager class? Is that correct? Because I am actually using the Application.LoadLevel class so maneuver between my game scenes.

11

@AndrewGrayGames My game has to be over because that way I can generate ad revenue after they die hahaha. But in all seriousness though, my game could be inserted into the “endless runner” genre and when you get hit by one of the obstacles coming down the map, you die, your score is posted, and I think I will also put it to where your highest score shows too.

1 Like
12

I didn’t expect your project to be as big as Fallout 4 :slight_smile:
I just showed an example of the ugliest UI possible lol

Personally, I use Application.LoadLevel. While it is obsolete, it still works just fine. To use the new Scene manager, you need to use this:

using UnityEngine.SceneManagement;

void LoadStart()
{
SceneManager.LoadScene("Start");
}

Here is the doc on the new SceneManagement: http://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/SceneManagement.SceneManager.html

Sometimes, the Unity developers just have to re-invent the wheel :frowning:

2 Likes
13

Lol It would take my whole life to program a game as large as FallOut 4 by myself! But anyways thank you so much! I guess I will stick to Application.LoadLevel for version 1.0 of my game for now. I just hope that Unity does not cut support for games that still use the Application.LoadLevel class instead of SceneManagement, considering LoadLevel is obsolete now. @DroidifyDevs

14

Unity usually doesn’t cut support for old scripts. For example, GetComponent was changed a while back. You can still write the obsolete version of GetComponent, but the API updater will automatically fix it to GetComponent<>. It would be stupid of Unity to stop supporting old versions as some old scripts might take a long time to re-write manually. Also, the Console will always show you if something is obsolete :slight_smile:

1 Like
15

Yeah you are completely right. I first started using Unity and following the tutorials whenever version 5 was released and you had to start using GetComponent in the Start() function. @DroidifyDevs Thank you for helping me out and for also being kind to a relatively new Unity user like me!

16

No problem :slight_smile:

1 Like
17

Dang. That’s EA-levels of evil. Why not go one step further and charge them to start the game?*

*: EA, that was not a suggestion. Please don’t do this, the age of coin-op ended long ago.

Probably a good idea. I haven’t played any infinite runners (they don’t interest me), so I’m not too familiar with how they work. I wonder if it’d be possible to take a page out of the First Person Shooters’ playbook and include checkpoints in infinite runner levels at all? Probably just a crazy idea, though.

(Also: 3700th post. Holy shishkabob.)

2 Likes
18

It can be done in a very non evil way. Check out Crossy Road for an example of humane monetisation of an infinite runner.

3 Likes
19

Maybe I could incorporate something like that in a later update, but for the first version of my game, that would not work well at all to have checkpoints. Good idea though! Who knows, maybe I’ll use it later or someone else reading this forum could use that idea! @AndrewGrayGames

20

If its something like hotline miami or supermeat boy you want the game to restart right away (because its a 1 hit kill) with the music keep looping in the background.

1 Like