Hey Everyone! I’ve been lurking for a few months and learning C#, the Unity lessons have been massively useful and I think, I’m ready to show my work so far!
I’ve used mostly store assets, and yes… the animation is dodgy at best!
Nightmare is a top down shooter, taking themes from Doom, Quake, Loaded, Alien Brood, Duke Nukem, and basically everything that made gaming in the 90’s enjoyable! The full game will include two game modes, survival and an 11 level campaign, at least one level having to be unlocked through in game achievements! Maybe later using local connectivity to enable survival multiplayer but that would be a long way off!
I’m hoping to get the “Survival mode beta” onto the Google Play store within the next couple of months, and an early playable alpha is available on my Facebook page, Retrodex Gaming
Below is a video play-test of Nightmare in the alpha stage. I think the next step is to set up the locomotion system for the player character, followed by trying to tidy up the animations so that hands aren’t floating everywhere!
Couple of quick wins today, added a pick-up with a 1 in 40 chance of dropping to refill ammo, and added the rocket launcher pickup to the top area of the map, with a price of 1000 points. Now waiting for lighting to bake… (7/11 transport jobs… yippee!)
Looks nice. No gripes in the visuals dept. from me. From watching the video, everything seems to be running smoothly, no glitches or anything like that. That said, it seems very “standard” in every regard. Standard weapons, such as the Infinite 9mm Pistol™, the Doom Chaingun™, the bad guys are demons/evil incarnate. In a post Doom world it’s hard not to see the parallels.
My constructive criticism would be that you haven’t shaken up the twin-stick formula or really put a unique spin on it, nor have you altered the Doom enemy and level design much. In fact, if you told me that this was a Doom fan-game I would immediately have believed it.
You’re off to a running start, but I think it’s time to try some new things.
P.S. What font is that? Looks very Metal Gear Solid.
Funny old thing… its the “standard” Jupiter font from the Unity standard UI assets!
Also, glad you’ve spotted that, as it very much is Doom inspired at the moment, while I get my teeth stuck into Unity. Doom is a heavy inspiration, as well as other 90’s games such as Loaded, Duke Nukem etc etc. It’s probably going to stay that way until I can find my “Unique Spin™”.
Shotgun damage now registers properly for all 5 shells, spread and speed variation increased. Shotgun now provides a decent upgrade from the Pistol™.
Menu backgrounds re-aligned to accommodate world space menus, and aligned through scenes.
Store sound effects added.
Ammo pickup now glows, and has sound on pickup.
Lava pit destroys enemies, and adds to round total. More of a failsafe if the colliders/navmesh fail and en enemy falls into the pit.
Blood effect now spills in the direction of the bullet that hit, instead of the a single direction.
Added a second main menu screen, to allow a constant data and music manager to be persistent from game start.
Working combo system code in place, providing 10 points for consecutive kills over 2 within 5 seconds, Need to find out how to edit rich text in script (C#) so different parts of the prompt are different colours.
Oh… and totally ripped off a certain Verhoeven movie for the menu screen!
So i’m pretty much using this as a day by day diary at the moment…
Not much time today, but I’ve managed to finish up a combo system, which rewards points for a chain of kills 2 of more, each within 3 seconds of each other,
Tuned the Melee Zombies navmesh settings to stop them getting lost / spinning on the spot all the time,
Fixed lava not damaging the player when armour is worn,
Fixed a couple of world holes and misaligned floor tiles,
Fixed a randomiser problem preventing the spawning of ammo packs,
Begun writing a random sound effect setup, so deathsounds are random.
Today, added a single stick control option with a shoot button instead of twin sticks,
Ludicrous mode, where blood flies in all directions,
Added second options screen, to toggle the above,
Fixed an issue where options set in the opening menu weren’t being saved into the game,
Playing with a new design for the HUD as well, opinions needed!
Your game looks nice, but there are some issues in my opinion:
The UI occupies too much valuable real-estate and in portions close to the center of the screen. It would be best if the UI elements would be smaller and near the screen’s edges. And that score text doesn’t need to be that big.
On the darker portions of the map, the player character is barely visible, and so are the weapons icons.
The default gun noise is too repetitive. Perhaps you could randomize the pitch just a little between shots.
The characters could use some blob shadow or projected texture or something to reduce the sensation of floating above the environment.
The enemies seem to fire at the player’s character even when they are outside the screen area. This might be annoying and frustrating for some.
The main menu screen looks kinda cheap, because of the “NIGHTMARE” text which has a different style than the rest of the interface. To avoid cheap looks, always try to use the same style or compatible ones. You’re using two incompatible styles there (Sci-Fi and Fantasy Horror).
UI has been compressed up now, Hopefully this design doesn’t block the view anywhere near as much!
I do plan on lighting the area around the character, when you say weapon icons, I guess you mean the selection buttons on the HUD?
Great idea that! Will have a play, probably just add a Random.Range to the pitch.
I’ve had problems before with shadows using LOADS of CPU time, especially on older devices. I might just be cheap and use a semi transparent circle at the feet and see how that looks.
Some enemies do have a large range, the fireball throwers at later stages especially, I’ll have to do some fettering of numbers!
I’m not happy with that logo myself… at the moment its a placeholder until I spend some time designing something to fit properly!
Great.
2a. You could lit the area arund the character, or you could use equatorial ambient light with a color slightly different than the sky (top-down) ambient light. This would create a contrast between the character and the floor even in dark areas.
2b.Yes I mean the selection buttons for guns: they’re all black with no lit outline or anything and in some areas they blend in with the dark environment. You could perhaps make those bluish rectangles slightly more opaque.
Alright.
Oh no, I don’t mean real shadows (I have problem with those myself on mobile devices). But, exactly as you said: a semi-transparent circle or hemisphere at the feet.
Alright, but then you could use a simple circular mini-map centered around the character, which would show the enemies which are outside the screen, so as to allow the player to shoot blind and still hit them.
Just remembered, if you’ve played the alpha linked above, it was very dark, the level is much better lit now I’ve finally got the lightmap to bake properly! I’ve also changed the ambient light so visibility is MUCH better!
I like the idea of a minimap, I was thinking of doing somethng similar to Aliens motion tracker. Failing that (last time I did a render texture for a minimap it ate CPU!) I might look at rendering some arrows by the players feet directing towards enemies if they have been alive for a little while.
Back to work so today is a slower day for progress, however the following have been done;
Updated the menus with a new selection button for controls and blood levels, was a p***s to impement, however the new buttons work without fault and with only a single tap.
Added a pain state, character reaction on player and red flash to screen, in lieu of a blood decal.
Adjusted levels on richocet and impact sounds, takes some of the monotony out of pistol firing.
Begun setting up a minimap system, more than likely will be an Aliens style motion tracker between the sticks at the bottom of the screen.
Minimap added and working well! Just some testing to do to make sure that it isnt using too much in the way of CPU time! Feel like I need to play with the positions of items now… thinking pause back on the far right, map in the top centre and turret button where it is? An outside opinion would help with this one!
Moved the HUD around, feels much better now! Also fixed the Turret AI while uploading the video below to recognise enemies properly, and made sure that the minimap icons disappear on enemy death.
Fingers crossed I’ve fixed a bug where a body bounces uncontrollably on death, as well as a bug that appeared where the control scheme wasn’t changing properly!
The video below is of the beta in its current stage for the first 10 rounds!
No picture or video for this update, the last two days have been spent writing the scripts for a grenade pickup that works similar to the Gersch device in COD: Zombies. The grenades pull enemies towards them, and kill them if they get too close.
On a side note I’m noticing more and more some physics errors, especially collisions not being detected, and objects falling through the floor. The most notable examples are grenades falling instead of bouncing, and enemies falling through the floor on death. Next step I think will be to optimise my scripts, as I think I’m calling certain bools too early, and in Update rather than FixedUpdate, as well as using Update for far too much information.
Fingers crossed with a lot of time in the profiler my aim is to bring the FPS back up to 120 minimum when testing on my Surface Pro, Oneplus 3 and Samsung S6 Edge instead of the 60fps min the game runs at currently. All being well it’s not long before I feel ready to put Nightmare on the Google Play store… pending a Logo redesign!
Yeah they’re all continuous dynamic. I think the problem is that I use a “switch” to activate the ragdoll when the death criteria is met. I think however, I’m deactivating the colliders for movement, before activating the ragdoll so for a split second, there is enough time to fall through the world! As for the grenades… I think that’s because I’m using update instead of fixed update! Fingers crossed I’ll find out tonight!
Work has been a bit slow lately, between my day job and a bit of a smash in a van… However having a play with logos today, heres one idea I quite like!
Nightmare just went live with it’s Survival Mode on the Google Play Store! Going to take a little break from working on it now other than to fix bugs that get discovered along the way, and work on a little VR idea I’ve got, before I get stuck into designing a campaign!!
