Mower Mayhem Launch & Six Shooter

So we launched Mower Mayhem and to our great surprise, people thought it was fun! While we didn’t exactly go viral on Itch.io, the response was largely positive with most of our players really digging the retro aesthetic. We even got a couple of let’s play videos by some smaller streamers. It was great to see our efforts in making a targeted game pay off. 

Here is the link to play Mower Mayhem:

Launching Six Shooter

The second game that I worked on as part of our Targeted Game Design assignment was Six Shooter, an early-2000’s-inspired, horror first-person shooter.

This game was so much fun to work on. I got to make my game-ready gun asset and all the animations to go along with it.

This was definitely the biggest technical challenge I’ve faced as a developer: modeling the gun and hand, rigging the FPS controller, and creating a set of pretty detailed animations. 

I also learned how to implement sound effects in the game: it was fun working out how to sync the tiny mechanical clinks and chinks of the reload effect to match the animation loop.

Six Shooter really pushed us as a team. Turns out there’s a lot of systems in a first-person shooter (who knew), even in a short linear experience like this one. One of the biggest hurdles was hooking up all the animations in Unity so that they feel responsive and transition nicely. It’s still not perfect, but aside from some programming issues, I think the gun feels pretty fun to shoot. 

Horror games are hugely popular on itch - it’s fair to say that we were making a game for a flooded market. Aside from a few bugs affecting a small set of users, we got a really positive response to Six Shooter at launch. In its first week, it was downloaded more times than Mower Mayhem and we had a number of content creators posting video playthroughs on our page. I can’t stress enough just how awesome these playthroughs are for us as young developers: it’s free playtesting from complete strangers! Seeing where players get stuck or frustrated and hearing their thoughts as they worked their way through the level made it super easy for us to quickly get a patched version up online.

One of the content creators discovered that even on max sensitivity settings, he could barely turn the camera around. This was due to the interaction between his mouses DPI and the game's sensitivity scaling. We never would have found this issue if he hadn't shared his feedback with us. During the six month project, I’m going to make it a priority to get this kind of playtesting information as early as possible.

You can download and play Six Shooter for free, here: