#stealth museum

Alright, so the game’s enjoyed a couple of weeks in the release widow and I am pleased with the attention it has received. For all my players, and fans, ad whoever promoted my game, I just want to thank you all!

At this point, I had a few problems plaguing my game that almost made me frustrated to deal with. While it is clear I have solved those issues in the last few weeks, I wanted to take a moment to just list the main issues I had with making my game.

The most obvious issue is that I was working on my own and, as such, whatever problems I ran into couldn’t be fixed simply by going to another group member, I had to look up the solution and, in many cases, ask an online Unreal help forum for solutions. In other areas I did get help from video tutorials and correspondence with the tutorial runners, so this was very helpful.

Another problem was that I was still having trouble with some aspects of my game, and I was about to leave them out. For instance, I was having trouble getting the enemies to actually die once the  projectile hit them, but that was easily rectified by actually asking someone and having them show me what I was doing wrong. Before this, I was actually considering leaving the feature out.

A couple of weeks was all it took for me to learn how to do the programming I needed to learn, and quite easily too. Unity is a powerful piece of software, yes, but most of the programming requires C# so it was difficult to get around using it all the time. Unreal 4, however, has the simple and easy to understand Blueprints interface, so with that it was easy to get the basic programming down so my game would be playable. Though, before it came to the final stage, there was a few original ideas that had to change before I released Stealth Museum

First, the conception of tossing the collected treasures at enemies to blow them up didn’t exist; the original mechanic was simply to dodge the robots, get the treasure and escape. After realizing that the original mechanic was too simple, I decided I had to bring in the notion o being able to shoot and kill the enemies. Being free to kill them all meant, however, that the player would have been able to get through the level easily. That was when another game mechanic came into play; limiting the player’s attacks to the number of treasures he had picked up, thus creating some challenge.

I had the idea of the time trial right from the start, but it was the starting limit I had problems with; how much would be too much, and so on. The 15 second bonus with each treasure was initially decided upon, and agreed that the time was appropriate. Originally, the time I had was 180 seconds, but after doing some testing I realized that players found the time limit to be not very stressful, so I bumped it down to a challenging 90 seconds which was still acceptable for the player to complete the level without getting any of the treasures.

Ever wonder if you can actually get all the statues in one playthrough? Well, you can! Just watch this video! 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6N1Bo3sMh0&feature=youtu.be