It's over! Dead Metal Punks never got to where I actually wanted it to be and there were a few factors involved in its demise. First off motivation started to really fall the further into the summer it got, a lot of the work basically went unseen/uncritisized which made it much more difficult to continue forwards with the project. Even having a team of 2-4 people would have alleviated most of this since there would be ideas being made and other views on building the game.
Secondly it got to a point where I felt that I was getting stuck in the one artstyle and this also added to the motivation killing. This was further added to when I would have to put 2 weeks of work aside to do art tests for jobs then come back to something that I felt was growing a bit stale. To be honest a lot of time was taken up by art tests and travelling to interviews/working (Once I had a job).
If I could go back on it and get a small team together and get some funding I genuinely think that the game would have met my expectations, at least the final project is something I will look back on as a great experience and a lot of the modelling knowledge I found has been incredibly useful in an actual workplace.
Onto the final build, I got almost everything done in the final level (Which is really 5 smaller levels merged together) aside from a few bugs and missing sound effects. It was a tougher job that originally expected as a tonne of glitches started appearing when I had to swap between both gameplay modes dynamically. In hindsight I should have just stuck with a single gameplay mode and continued improving that.
The tank mode is superior in my opinion because the camera controls the pace of the gameplay and the large amount of screen space made for some really nice environments and particle effects. On the other hand I like the character sections for the excuse of creating character models and getting some really useful experience creating rigs and animating. I should have just kept characters for cut scenes or menus though it would have saved a lot of time as the everything needed to be much more complex. The AI was 'smarter', the level design required a lot of blocking out, the characters took a lot longer to make, the environments had to be more detailed and there was a tonne of animation. In the tank levels a lot of these things were not needed because of the distance and enemies like planes not needing actual animation.
Video ( The recording software broke near the end so the victory screen is cut out, I didn't want to risk not having a video uploaded in time) -
In summary, it was lot of fun to create and forced me to explore a lot of things I didn't know about creating games. Even though I know its not where I wanted it to be I am quite happy that it even works in the first place and I know that small game projects are not out of reach as long as I don't get too crazy with what I want to do. Also in the end although a lot of the content never got into the project, every enemy, costume and boss design is concepted to show what it could have been like and there are very few blank holes in that side of things. Finally, this experience went beyond what I thought I would have been able to do in a year and it still turned out much better than group projects I have spent a year on so maybe over the next few years I will actually finish creating a game as a solo developer.
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