softwareinthe90s

Having made a few projects with Unity, I had become comfortable with my skill levels and was confident that I could make any small game i wanted. The Dead of Night took 2 weeks to put together. After I had finished I started 5 projects. I was spoilt for choice as to which one to continue.

However I have decided to revisit this project and improve it too a five star project.

Too start I listed all the things I wanted to include in the Dead of Night. I added all the suggestions I’ve had from players and testers. I then looked at it from a design point of view and tried to judge what changes I could make to increase return players and play time.

I came up with this list:

increase feedback from enemies (sounds when hit, health-bars, etc)

2 . Increase variety of enemies and add boss rounds.

A story mode.
More weapons and increased detail within them (reloading, ammo, etc)
Increase player feedback with global high-scores, achievements and increasable stats.
More Accessibility (downloads, mobile versions, etc)

This week I have been working on the first point. I’ve added a health system to the enemies and fixed a bug which meant the zombies would appear when out of view range.

It was a challenge to get the U.I. health bar to disappear when out of range of the players field of view. In the end I ran a small sub-routine which calculated if the zombie was in view and then displayed it’s health bar if it returned true. My reasoning being, unlike the enemy, a partially visible health-bar wouldn’t enhance the game experience. The health-bar should be either visible or not.

My intention is to spend at least a few months on upscaling The Dead of Night into a really good game with solid replay value.

I would be very grateful for any sensible suggestions to the game as it is. What would you like to see? What were you expecting when you started the game? tweaks? bugs? etc

itch.io Community » General » Release Announcements · Created a new topic Top Down survival Horror - The Dead of Night (playable in browser)

softwareinthe90s6 years ago

https://softwareinthe90s.itch.io/the-dead-of-night

Hi guys,

This is my latest creation, The Dead of Night. A top down survival horror game. I'm mostly trying to focus on developing atmosphere and game design with this one.

You are armed with a flashlight and a pistol and are tasked with taking down the waves of undead that come after you. You can only see the zombies when you point your flashlight at them, and that battery won't last forever. Once it's gone, only the ocasional flash of thunder will illuminate the undead.

I'd love to get some constructive criticism on this. I know some of the gameplay elements need tweaking. I might take this one further so any ideas for future development are most welcome!