Posted May 30, 2024 by Tclards
Author: Tyler Clardy
Date Posted: 5/30/2024
This week marked the end of early development and the beginning of our Alpha. We had to pull a lot of things together fairly quickly to get the game in a stable and cohesive state before we pass it off to QA testers this weekend. We also needed to make some promotional materials.
I started by rebalancing a lot of what we already have, tweaking health and damage values, stamina costs, ammo values, and a variety of other things to tighten up the gameplay loop and offer a reasonable challenge to our players. Then, I set about creating a tutorial level. Previously we had a short description and some controls listed in a ReadMe document, but we wanted something in-game to teach players how to play.
With a solid tutorial level in place, I began to focus on creating some promotional materials. I took several screenshots, a few of which have been uploaded here to our Itch page, and recorded about 10 minutes of raw gameplay footage in a release build of our game. I used the footage to do two things. First I created a trailer for the project, which was definitely outside my comfort zone. I am not a voice actor or a video editor, but I wanted to do it right. It feels a little silly and was clearly made by someone who is not a professional, but I am proud of it nonetheless. It has also been posted here on our Itch page. Second, I used the gameplay footage to record some developer commentary with my teammate, just chatting about our game and the experience developing it. The commentary can be viewed here: Developer Commentary
Now we look forward to the future! There is still a lot of work to do as we push toward a Beta version.