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Crescendo
A rhythm-based first person shooterAbout
- Role: Sole Developer
- Team Size: 1
- Development Time: 1 month
- Platform: Windows
- Engine: UE 4.26
Crescendo is a rhythm-based first person shooter, created to be my take on a modern 90s-era shooter. I wanted to see what a game built from scratch in one month would look like, recognising that limiting the timeframe like this would likely mean having to accept things that were not as polished as I would otherwise create.
Sole Developer
As the sole developer, I was responsible for, well, everything. I designed the weapons, level, and mechanics present in the game. I also programmed all of the logic used throughout the game, testing everything as I went and fixing bugs where necessary.
Over the course of this one-month project, I also chronicled my progress and the reasoning behind my decisions in weekly installments over on the Two Cans Gaming blog.
Retrospective
What Went Well
- Scope Limitation: Over the course of the project, I was able to keep myself from adding features beyond what I would be able to create in my one-month timeline.
- Core Design: Early playtests confirmed that my initial direction of a rhythm-based fps held substantial promise.
- Goal Setting: Each week I was able to set clear and completable goals formyself, and allocate my time accordingly.
What Went Wrong
- QA: I did not give myself sufficent time to test the core systems that I was constructing the game around, and discovered a massive bug 3 days before my self-imposed deadline.
- Art Direction: I waited too long to decide on an overall art direction, and as a direct result, did not have enough time at the end of the project to create the sprites I wanted to include.
What to Improve
- Shooting Mechanics: The current iteration of the shooting mechanics needs to be reworked so that there isn't a delay between player providing inputs and the game providing audio/visual feedback.
- Audio Design: Making everything happen in time with the music can lead to too many sound effects playing simultaneously, so a system needs to be implemented to decide what sounds to prioritize.
- Trust First Impressions: If I have a poor first impression of a mechanic I'm implementing, this frequently means said mechanic will also leave a poor first impression on players.