Postmortem

Development 

When I first came up with a lawnmower game, I thought a lot about how to combine it with the shmup genre. The biggest features of shmup games that I thought were dodge, shoot, and moving forward. In order to keep the player moving forward, the bull moves forward from the back of the character. The most fundamental difference between my game and the shump game is that killing animals rushing towards me doesn’t help me to get a high score. To get a high score, you have to mow the grass from the bottom as much as possible.

This project is designed to feel 3 emotions, fear, cautious, and mad, depending on the stages. Each stage is played in three different mechanics. In the first stage, there is nothing you can do other than run away. In the second stage, you have to mow the lawn by firing the saw blade, but be careful not to damage the animals. In the final stage, you can get rid of all the stress you felt earlier. The player can smash the bulls with a lawnmower to blow them away.

Process:

After the first playtest, I made a few big changes. The one of them is a ragdoll system. By using the ragdoll function, you can see the character flying dynamically by physics base when colliding with others. This made the game so much better and lively.

I have created a system that prevents players from leaving the play area. Once a player goes out of a certain range, the timer is set to 4 seconds with blue diagonal lines which mark prohibited areas. The game is over when you stay outside for 4 seconds.

UI and Gameplay is fully worked with Gamepad(Xbox). 

Failure  & Next step

 Getting rewarded with scores is too cliché. At least it would be nice to use a different unit.

The game is difficult. The scale of the character is long vertically,  making it difficult to control. I want to make use of the 3D sound function a little better so that the volume of the animals are different depending on the distance, so that players can be prepared to dodge it.

There is a lack of explanation of a story and background.