Published & Completed: NovaStar
Hope everyone enjoyed the holidays! I may have put off these medium posts a bit too long. I will admit I got caught up focusing on NovaStar and also the holidays. But here it is! Anyway, the team and I completed NovaStar a couple of weeks back now. It’s still crazy to think how far we all came in such a short amount of time. Just a few months ago I had never even opened visual studio or unity, and here I am with a group of awesome programmers, creating a game from start all the way to publishing on itch.io.
Here is the link for anyone interested in checking out our game! Feedback also welcome!
Since my last post, I believe we got into a lot of the polishing and final stages of the development. Most of the big tasks, such as the enemies, bosses, animations, UI, had all been pretty much completed by this point. And so with M.V.P. complete, the final stages were debugging, tuning, and post-processing before we published our game. In the clips above you can see some of the post-processing and finishing touches added. For comparisons, you can check out previous posts to see what the game looked like before.
Also, you can see in the boss clip, I created a boss transition effect. This was done through the animator. I had to create an event to tell the game when to activate the sequence and the rest was animated out. I faded the background from dark blue to dark red and black and also scaled the clouds out to emphasize the boss battle. During the transition, I also added an audio change but unfortunately this cant be heard in the gif.
Some other things we worked on, were the spawn manager and setting up each wave to spawn the types of enemies and animated patterns that we wanted. And then a big part of the finishing touches was the UI and getting everything cooperating properly. I wasn’t really a part of the UI, but everyone that was did an incredible job of putting the whole thing together.
I'm sure I am missing a ton of things done since my last post but it really was an awesome experience to go hands-on with a project like this. To think that we managed to take a concept from start to finish in a couple of weeks really is crazy. Looking back I feel like I learned so much, from using github as a team, animating scenes and various other things, abstract classes, singletons, and all the coordination needed to work on a team to create a game, this experience definitely taught me a lot of valuable skills to take forward.
