Redone and What Now

Eyo to anyone who happens to stumble upon this little game.

After a long hiatus, I finally was able to get back to working on this project and rework some of the systems.

I was unhappy with how the movement and gunplay felt in the game, so I took the plunge and bought the Low Poly Shooter Pack to use as a baseline. It comes with most everything anyone making an FPS game would want, the developers are active and continually updating it, and there's an active Discord so you have a place to ask for help if/when needed instead of it all being radio silence. Anything not there can be worked into the system decently well. 

There are a few shortcomings. The documentation left me wanting, basic things like how to change/turn off player abilities or how to change weapon stats were either missing or very brief in their explanations. It took a bit of digging around to really understand how everything works together, and lots of troubleshooting when I started adjusting things to fit what I wanted. Still, I would highly recommend people pick up this asset. It's pricey at $300, but even with its shortcomings it's absolutely worth it to just have everything you need in one package instead of having to build it all up yourself.

For this project, I keep going back and forth over whether to continue working on it, or clean it up a bit and move on. I used this project as an excuse to sit down and focus on learning Unreal, and I think I've accomplished that for the most part. At this point it's a question of how much juice I can squeeze from this project, and it's difficult to know. I still have to reintroduce the obstacle course game mode back into the project, as well as the notation/hint/slo-mo system, and I think that is where the core of the game is at. I'm just not quite sure if it's as solid of a core as I thought it'd be.

The biggest anxiety currently is my financial position. To no one's surprise, the economy is not super great at the moment, and the job hunt has been extremely rough. So, I'm split between job hunting, working on this project, or working on any of the other 3 projects I have that are slowing cooking. I want to update my portfolio to better appeal to developers and hiring managers, but the time I spend working on this is time spent not working on something else. 

Adulthood's fun.

For now, I do want to get the basic things I had in the original prototype back into the remake, so the Slow Mo, Notation/Hint system, and Value setting (press 1-9 and you input 1-9 into the cell instead of incrementing it up) need to be redone, which shouldn't be too hard as I already have them done from before. After that, I'm not sure. The obstacle course style gameplay will need to be iterated on more, and as much as I want to introduce enemies, I need to keep myself from looking too far ahead into the future and just work on what the game needs right now. At the very least, the basic sudoku gameplay is there and working, so even if I do put this on the backburner I at least have something to show for it.