BEGGINER UNITY GAME DEVELOPMENT

Proxima Centari Post-Mortem

//Hunting bugs and optimizing

IT’S DONE! or is it?

Over the course of a week I worked on Proxima Centauri, a 2.5D space shooter, for my GameDevHQ certification. Many hours went into the games creation during that week and my 12 year old son, Jacob and his friend playtested the hell out of the thing. I even got lucky and got some feedback on Itch.io about the game. https://valdarixgames.itch.io/proxima-centari if you want to play the current build.

So with some confidence, about 85%, I submitted the game to GameDevHQ and awaited my feedback. Hopefully it was good enough to pass the certification. It wasn’t, not yet.

GDHQ NOTES

GDHQ had a pretty good set of notes. I will cover them below:

1. Enemies can still shoot after they die.
2. No sound indication on mini-boss being hit.
3. No visual indication on mini-boss and boss being hit.

4. Enemy Weapon SFX missing.

5. Enemy wave system not correct. Don’t use random spawn manager.

6. Settings menu not available in game play session.

7. Final boss FPS issues, becomes unplayable.

Personal Notes

It had been 2 weeks since I played Proxima Centauri, so when I played it to verify GDHQ’s notes I found a few issues of my own.

1. Background is too bright and too similar to foreground elements making things like power ups hard to see.
2. Enemies were to big and spawning them in made the game cluttered.
3. Making the player kill all enemies in a wave before he can progress was making the game slow.
4. Enemies did not shoot at the player.

Reviewing and Fixing

One of the biggest things I learned is to do a final play test of the version you built. My in editor work was OK, but when I went back and playtest the Windows version of the game I saw all of the issues mentioned by GDHQ.

My sound issues were due to some really bad audio mixing on my part. I went back and remixed the sound and then added volume…