Impound Postmortem

The development of Impound was very turbulent. Prior to October I had assembled a small team of people to help me work on the game. The thing was though, that we were all amateurs. None of us had finished making a game before. Before October we came up with a general sort of idea for the game: We knew that we wanted it to be a bullet hell, we knew that we wanted it to be in space, we knew that we wanted the gameplay to revolve around a melee attack that reflected bullets. The idea was to limit your options when put into "bullet hell-y" situations so that maybe the player might come up with new strategies to get through those situations. We flirted with the idea of time travel as an excuse to have a medieval knight in space but eventually dropped it for the idea that the space station was a police station and you were a guy trying to get his car/spaceship thing back from the impound lot (where the name comes from). And so at the end of the first week of devtober we had accomplished nothing. We had no assets, no code, and not even a Unity project to work together on. At the start of the second week we all sort of panicked and began working as fast as we could. I made the tileset, the player and two iterations of its attack, the enemies and the bullets while my friend set up the basic gameplay system we were going to have (reflecting and pressing a button to open doors). At the end of the second week we had a proof of concept/prototype but it was very... meh. We decided to add obstacles. Turrets that came out from the walls and shot bullets at you as long as they were active and what we called the "tack shooter" that had a design based on the Bloons TD tower of the same name. The tack shooter was personally one of my favorite things to make. It was one of the (many) things in Impound that I made 100% from scratch. After 3 weeks we had some semblance of an idea of how we wanted our game to go so we started on level design. Or should I say I started on level design. Everyone else was either making sound effects or polishing their scripts so their stuff would work as well as possible when the time came. It was very hard coming up with level design that lent itself to helping the player learn about the game and get better as they played. Looking back I'm still not sure I accomplished that all that well. There were several rooms that I found extremely difficult to balance because they were difficulty spikes where I wanted difficulty spikes but they were still way harder than I wanted them to be (and sometimes downright unfair). I eventually settled on following a flow state graph as a way to guide myself with the level design to make sure it was challenging but not too challenging and to make sure it kept the player invested for what little time we had them. I finished the level design on the last Friday of October with nothing left for me to do other than do a polish pass on the game to make sure everything looked good.... or so I thought. On Saturday night it was becoming clear that we were going to have to work for a lot of Sunday as well to make the deadline. My teammates all had school commitments that they either a) needed to turn in or b) needed to study for. This meant they could not finish the game. The game was so close to finished I could taste it. I could see it so clearly being done. So I sat down at 9pm on Saturday the 30th and worked until 6pm on Sunday the 31st. I added sound effects, several scripts for minor object behaviors, all of the UI, the title screen, 2 new attacks for the boss, and fixed what felt like 5 million bugs. After 21 hours of work I finished the game and it was still extremely buggy. You can clip out of bounds really easily. if you don't go through a door fast enough you get crushed between it and the wall. Sometimes when getting pelted by bouncy bullets you just start sliding uncontrollably. And to be completely honest of all the bugs that are in the game right now I could probably only fix half. There's quite a lot that I just can't figure out the cause of. With all that said, I think the game itself is pretty fun. Underneath all the bugs is a very decent game especially for a first game (at least in my opinion.) I suppose in retrospect we probably should have used that first week. But if you're reading this and you played our game thanks! We really appreciate it. Btw the boss' laser attack is my favorite thing in that game. It feels soooooo beefy