Barter in Blood REMASTERED

Alright, so I have updated Barter in Blood ! I was going through my old games and found that first of all, I still had two different versions of this game on my profile page. Since this was created for Ludum Dare, I didn’t want to break the rules of updating it after the deadline, so I instead just made two separate projects. 

Once I played the game, I noticed a number of issues that came with lack of time management skills for this as one of my first game jam submissions. I was even using the default blue background! So, in my efforts to procrastinate the paper that I had to write, I spent about two hours working on an update to make the game more fun to play. Here are some tips that I did that you could also apply to your own projects to make them instantly more satisfying and fun. 

First, I added sound effects. (Okay, first I replaced the default blue background but that’s obvious. Never use that, trust me.) It feels so much more satisfying to shoot the gun and kill enemies with these sound effects that I made extremely quickly in Bfxr. I’ve played a number of jam games that don’t have music or sound effects, and trust me, it makes a world of a difference to your game. If you don’t like making music in a program like Bosca Ceoil, then go over to OpenGameArt and get some music for free. They have some really great selections of art, music, sound effects, everything. For making sound effects, you can also use Bfxr or play around with things in Audacity. 

Second, I (mostly) fixed the ghost movement and collision issues. I was keep track of the player position and then moving the rigidbody position closer towards to Player each time. However, this made the ghost’s colliders almost like combine and form one huge mass of ghost slowly coming towards the player. I fixed this by instead setting the ghost’s velocity towards the player’s position and using OnCollisionEnter rather than OnTriggerEnter. This is because I wanted the player to like bounce off the ghosts so they don’t lose all their lives from colliding with a ghost. The ghost’s movement is still kinda wonky but it’s better this way.

Third, I made the game faster. As seen in one of Jonas’s tutorials on How to Make Your Game fun, I was able to make the game a lot faster and now it’s a lot more challenging and fun. I’d recommend trying out making your game faster and seeing if you find it more fun or not. 

Finally, I just fixed some bugs with Restarting and the music playing.