First Playable: Wipe Out the Virus!
Creating a video game was a great, sometimes frustrating, but a really fun experience. I am the programmer and the producer of the game. Yaqing Gu is the artist and the designer. We started out by discussing different ideas for the game and decided to make a SHMUP (shoot ’em up). With the ongoing pandemic, we thought it might be a nice idea to make a game in which the player can wipe out the virus and have fun doing it.
Yaqing created the entire artwork for the project. As I was the programmer with no prior experience of Unity, I went through a number of tutorials to familiarize myself with the platform. I looked at a bunch of games with similar mechanics and implemented our version of the game. I had quite a few problems smoothing out all the coding scripts. For an example, I couldn’t figure out how to register the collisions of the bullets with the enemy. Once all the bugs were sorted, it was really fun playing around, adding sounds, and creating an actual alpha version of the game.
Alpha Playtest
Most of the players responded quite positively to the game, which was really gratifying. We received a bunch of suggestions for improving a few aspects of the game. Based on the feedback that we received, we are thinking about adding three lives for the player or creating enemy waves that get increasingly faster as the time goes on. Apart from that, we received a suggestion that we could change the background for each wave. We will discuss these as a team and discuss which ones to implement for the final version.
