WaveFPS Post Mortem

Game Jam Theme: Waves

Game Type: FPS arena shooter

Project: CCastilloWaveFPS

Overview:

I created my project here for the game off but didn't think it was ready for submission but I'm gonna go through everything that went well and wrong. Even though I wasn't planning to submit due to time restraints I still wanted to go with the theme of the jam which was "waves" in which I interpreted it as waves of enemies. Project was built on Unreal and the goal was to make something fast and somewhat appealing for a small project.

What Went Well:

I think my implementation of the "wave" theme went well since having waves of enemies is a common mechanic in many games. Making enemy waves is easy and match the theme at the same time making it good to control gameplay loop and feeling. All of my core mechanics worked flawlessly from the shooting to the double jump. I gained hands- on experience with making HUD widgets, creating and managing spawners, enemy AI and configuration of my gamemode blueprint to make universal variables. With all this in mind I was able to finish a working build even though I didn't feel like it was ready for submission.

What Didn't Go Well:

A reason for me not submitting the project was that I didn't think I added enough since I was constraint by time and other projects. I would've like to add more enemy variety since all I have is a singular red npc placeholder running at the player, have better readability of  the level since I kept it very minimal like adding more tutorials that teach the player the movement and more interesting structures. I've added many player feedback features such as spawn timers, wave count, spawn indicators, camera shake, and sound effects but I feel like I could've added more in terms of all the things I've stated like better death animations instead of just a bright red ball and things of that nature. I had a hard time figuring out how fast to spawn the enemies in order to make the game feel balanced and not to overwhelming but I think I got to a serviceable difficulty for this build. I ran into many build errors while packaging my project that took a few hours of my time as well since I didn't have the proper visual studio components and took me a bit to figure out which components would fix my issues and also there were problems after I changed the project name and had to enter the engine.ini files in order to fix any naming complications.

Final Thoughts:

I had fun building this project but I did keep it small and simple and wish I had more time and commitment to make something bigger and better but I gained valuable Unreal Engine experience and despite some of the challenges I delivered a playable build at the end of the day that follows the theme subject. I'll definitely look to allocate my time better in the future in order to create more high quality projects.