Another month has passed, that means it’s time for my (slightly) regular monthly dev log. As always, I’ll discuss what I’ve been up to, what’s new & what’s next. Let’s get into it…

More Powers!

Only one power up would have been boring right? So now when you enter the shack it cycles through & picks one at random. I’ve added an extra 3 powers:

• Shield – temp. invincibility
• Amp – attract more zombies to the area
• Headphones – play your song faster (for the nuke)

This required a fair bit of balancing, I had to figure out how fast I want the player to get a nuke in the first place & change how many zombies spawn in the area. I also had to make sure when the relevant power was active it was fair & not under-powered or too OP.

Upgraded Loot boxes

So last month I added tiers to the supply drops, but it was a little too simple for my taste & you had no idea what you were getting from it, so I decided to add drop rates (with some visual feedback):

I had to put a lot of thought into this one, and a lot of white board space. It’s not perfect but it has a display for before you buy. Then when a supply drop is active the text locks & green text appears to show you what the next tiers do. It tells you how many keys will be dropped, the chance of getting a costume & roughly how much cash back you’ll get from the loose change.

It took a while to get this working properly, I thought a few days maybe but that quickly turned into a few weeks. This was probably me over complicating things for the fun of it and I hated every second of it but I’m so glad it’s in there & out of the way now.

Problems

Damn, where do I start. I don’t have a team anymore, I guess it’s back to solo dev! Because of this I’ve been stressed, burned out and I’ve been forced to make some changes which I will talk about in a minute.  On top of that life is keeping me as busy as always, which is why I’ve gone quiet on social media recently. I won’t go into it all, this is a dev log not my diary… All you need to know is I’m almost ready to throw myself back into game dev. But first…

Hitting Pause

I’ll just be honest I may have bitten a little more than I can chew with this game. I don’t want to scrap months of work but at least for now I think it should be set aside. There’s a lot of reasons behind this and it’s not an easy decision, but I think it’s the best one. If I find a steady team again it may come back. I mean it is possible solo, but I simply don’t have enough energy to take this where I want it (without killing the quality).

So wait, what now? Well I chalk this up as a learning experience & bounce back, what did I learn?

• Don’t rely on other people (at least have a backup plan)
• Scope is everything

It’s currently mid-week so I’m taking the rest of the week off well I figure things out. I’ll be looking at the 10 prototypes but this time I’m going small & simple, short & sweet. Most importantly I want something achievable, I’m leaning more towards mobile at the minute. I want at least one game if not multiple before the year ends. I may even jump in a few game jams!

Now I’ve got to go plan a game,

Catch you next time!