This is the third blog for my game, The Great Beyond. In week one, I explained what the game was about, and in week two I discussed the user interface design.

This week, you finally get to see a gameplay video!

I don’t have a nice voice, so there is no narration. This is not a trailer, it’s just a simple, long video of me playing one of the levels. There will be a trailer in the future, once the game is more polished.

Feedback

Whilst watching the video, you may have noticed a few problems. I will gladly take feedback, but first, here is what I already know:

I am aware that the bullets are not accurate when it comes to aiming towards the target, or might not count as hitting a target when it should have; I will be improving this over time.

Speaking of which, the level 4 Bullet Blaster started shooting bombs down instead of up! That’s an easy bug to fix!

The soldiers will sometimes not stand close enough to the enemy, and so the enemy will hit the rocket without being shot at. This is a simple fix of making the soldiers stand nearer to the rocket, and only when there are more soldiers, do they then spread out.

I died miserably in Day 10. That is a very difficult round, which I purposefully put in to show how hard the game can get. It should not be as early as Day 10, so I will add extra rounds in between, so that the player has more time to prepare.

I will be adding sound effects and ambient noise.

I will need to add a game over screen.

To help add replayability, I will take inspiration from games like Bloons Tower Defence 5, and add various challenge modes and add more map varieties.

You can assign ladders to be placed on gems, but gems cannot be removed. There is no negative to this, as the ladder will never be built, but it may cause a little confusion.

The Hospital said it had two Doctors working inside it rather than none.

Sometimes, you may miss important news. I am considering to add a minimap, which will have flashing icons to show where the problems are, and you can click on them to go directly to the source. This will take a long time to implement if I go forth with it. An other idea is to add a button that shows recent headlines.

I do not have plans to add a color blind mode. Whilst I appreciate how this might impact the gameplay for some, I unfortunately over-depended upon colours for displaying data to the player. If I were able to afford an artist, I could, for example, ask them to replace the different coloured circles with detailed appearances. The miner would look like a person with a pickaxe and not an orange blob! Therefore, the colour would not matter. There are many cases where I did, sadly, over depend on colours. Sorry.