wow, 7dfps was awesome

In seven days we managed to put out an action fps in unity called transaparencies. My original idea for a 7dfps game was a first person take on Hotline Miami's gameplay, requiring a seemingly top-down view in fast improvisation, which ended up in first person with transparent walls to see the whole level. We ended the week with 7 weapons, 2 enemies, and 20 levels, and an almost bug-free finished game: http://7dfps.com/?action=games&id=78. (try and beat it! It's hard!)
The transparent walls were the first issue to deal with. I had imagined custom shaders that rendered things behind walls completely differently so the room you were in was obvious. This was way beyond me, let alone in just 7 days. The simple solution was semi-transparent walls with a solid coloured floor, in very blocky shaped rooms and corridors. Something behind one wall will be shaded by the wall a little bit, and something behind two walls shaded twice as much. With the floor plan obvious, it was actually pretty easy to see your way around the whole level.
Our team started as 2 coders, plus one artist, plus me. The two coders were unfortunately completely occupied and couldn't help. I ended up coding the whole thing myself, something very new to me. hjaarnio worked specifically on art assets. Though most of his days were busy, in his free time he modeled, rigged and animated the two characters. Souler did the concept for the second character, though we didn't have time or spare triangles to accommodate all the details in his awesome drawings. In order to keep the game's visuals less simple, the levels had no detail to them; extra geometry would only add confusion to the already confusing transparency. Even the doors and teleports added later were simple rectangular prisms. So though I had come into this planning on doing nothing but art assets and working with someone else coding, I ended up writing the entire thing myself, something I hadn't even thought in my ability. And I thoroughly enjoyed it.
We are going to continue to develop this game. First and foremost, the AI needs a LOT of help. There is no node system. There is barely and randomness to their behaviour. They're not all that fun to play against in some cases. Other additions to the game will be something like turrets, and harder to kill boss-like enemies, maybe a few guns, and definitely an FAQ on guns and gameplay. We are going to continue our group development of other game ideas (you can read about a few that we've started on our website) but should start the upgrade of Transparencies soon-ish. As always, you can chat with us at #fuzzy on chat.freenode.net (IRC).
IDubbbz's gameplay video review of Transparencies:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7OoeAhg-CE

7 hour fps challenge, and the current 7 day jam

This year, 7dfps  added a new, short precursor challenge: make an fps in 7 hours, as opposed to the usual 7 days. We had to try.

We ended up creating the game locusts. We couldn't manage finishing it in 7 hours. Locusts was created in 14 hours total, after several complications. But it was fun. For the most part, coding it was completely new to me. I had to learn a lot as I put it together. Most of the code would probably turn your hair grey, some parts of it, like the enemy attacks testing to see if they hit the player, are complete workarounds ignoring the actually useful systems I learned about later. The last 2 hours of dev I was simply trying to fix my horrid script that ended up allowing the player to kill enemies, but only on the order they spawned.

I'm glad we participated in the 7hfps, if only to learn and not repeat the mistakes during the valuable 7 days we have now.

One of the things we learned about was communication. We have 4 members of our team working on our 7dfps game, transparencies. Hjaarnio is making art assets in Blender, while BeardlessOne and SomeKittens are writing scripts. I'm jumping around between both sides of development. We aim to make an fps that plays like a top-down shooter, inspired by Hotline Miami. The walls are transparent, to attack enemies with planned out timing, thrown weapons stun enemies, ammo is short and you've gotta move quickly. Progress is going good and I can't wait to see what everyone else has been working on.