Greetings everyone! Welcome to MH-Zombie! This is my first game, and going into it I had nothing but a beginners C++ course from eight years before in college. The idea for it came to me in 2014 when I was deployed to Kuwait as an Assistant Operations Officer for my AH-64D Apache Helicopter Battalion. Leading up to the deployment, I had played a ton of Battlefield 3; jumping into the scout helicopters at every opportunity, but it always bothered me how hard it was to get the helicopters, and how hard it was to fight off the seasoned helicopter aces on the other team. The AC-130 Operator mobile game was pretty popular then, and its simplicity caught my attention. I wondered how successful a game that followed the same formula, only with a helicopter, could be. A friend told me about the Unity game engine, and I downloaded it and made a feeble attempt to learn C# and build a game, but after grappling with a free helicopter script that I couldn't make work, I gave up.

Fast forward to Spring of 2020: I was playing a lot of Battlefield 4 and running into the same frustrations from Battlefield 3. I figured there had to be a game like the one I had imagined back in 2014 by now, and searched through Steam and the App Store for one. ARMA II seemed promising, but to my surprise I was unable to modify the controller layout, which was an absolute dealbreaker for me. DCS World was interesting too, but they had no helicopters I was willing to fly, and it was very technical, where I just wanted to jump in and start shooting things. So, I decided it was time to consider another try at making my own game. I wrote a proposal outlining the basic features and function of the game by priority, complexity, and difficulty (as far as I could imagine, having no actual development experience), and got to work researching a good starting point.
I found a tutorial on how to start a helicopter game in Unity (it was an early access course, and the developer never completed it), and I built on the very basic flight model and C# scripting/Unity knowledge it gave me to start the beginnings of the game you can now play today. Along the way, I used Youtube, Reddit, StackExchange, and assets from the Unity Asset Store when I got stuck or couldn't find the answers in the Unity documentation.
By July 2020 I thought I would have a releasable game no later than October, but my little brother was never satisfied with the builds I sent him to playtest, and I continued to add features and improvements over the course of the next year and a half.
When I finally completed all of the basic features I thought the game should have as an improvement on the AC-130 game model (to include everything in my original proposal), I released it. As I gain experience and knowledge, the game may morph into another game altogether, with the original maps still available as an 'Arcade' mode.
Anyway, thanks for your time, attention, and support; many of your suggestions have been integrated into the game, and I look forward to your feedback as I continue to improve MH-Zombie!