Night of Doom 2

With Night of Doom being my best selling game I had considered making a sequel however I still faced the problems of having no artistic talent.

However when I was contacted by a modeller who I worked on my Final year project with asking if I'd like to team up with him and make something I realised I could vastly improve Night of Doom.

Ole Grønbæk is an impressive artist both in his art style and the speed at which he works. There was times during the project where he could create assets faster than I could implement them.
He also did the level design, placing the objects in the game world using the editor I built into the engine.

You can download a pc version of the game here:
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/11992346/NoD2.zip

It requires the Xna redistube 3.1 available from Microsoft at:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=53867a2a-e249-4560-8011-98eb3e799ef2

Night of doom 2 on Xbox Marketplace

Pro's

Having a professional artist to work with really improved the quality of the game. The Level and characters are tenfold better than anything else I've used before.

4 Player Split Screen

As the first night of doom was a single player game I decided I wanted to do a multiplayer version. While it was more work to implement I feel that it was worth it.

The zombie AI in the game are vastly improved. They use a navigation grid that I placed by hand to navigate in the game world. I decided to place them by hand as we only had a single level and building a procedurally generated system would have taken longer. The nodes on the navigation grid use a concept I called "Mutexing" as it's based on the threading system. Each node can only be used by a single zombie at a time, this prevents them all following the same path and creates complexity. While I could have used A* to navigate the grid I decided against it as I didn't need the level of accuracy that it provides. Instead I used the simple system of moving towards the players general direction when selecting which path to traverse. This gave good enough results and lead to some stupidity which fits with zombies anyway.

Weapons

I decided early on that I wanted 3 weapons in the game, the handgun, shotgun and machine gun. I felt that this would allow some strategy as the shotgun is better at clearing large amounts of zombies at close range.

This also lead to more interesting pickup play as the pickups became more important later in the levels

Con's

Optimisation

Night of Doom 2 is the most taxing game i've worked on for Xbox, and I had to repeatedly optimise the engine as I added more assets to the game. Due to the quantity of assets I needed to implement multi threaded loading and also created two different internal quality settings for single and multiplayer. In four player split screen the engine had to render four times each frame which meant that I had to be efficient.

Timing

The game was originally meant to ship around Halloween however we missed our deadline as we felt that it was better to release the game when it was ready opposed to cutting features and assets. We'd intended to work on the game until we were happy then hold onto it till next Halloween. However Microsoft announced that they were releasing a new version of XNA and they would stop submission of older version. Porting over the entire source code would be a large task as we'd used a third party animation dll which would no longer be compatible. This lead to the decision of launching the game in the spring which I believe to have negatively effected sales.