What's cooking?

Week 2 didn't work as planned. Unfortunately.
Now you might be asking: which game challenge?
As I'm trying to gain more coding skills, don't want to get rusty using Unity and learn overall new things I started a little challenge for myself. The name is quite self-explanatory. Each week – one game idea. Very basic, but always something new.
But my goals and ideas for week 2 were a bit too ambitious. I had the idea of building some gameplay in which the player flees from a thread behind, making a path for all the trapped animals and themselves. It would be a side-scroller and the perspective orthographic, 3rd person. I had the idea of fire spreading with a particle effect. I was not as crazy to think I would really visually destroy the environment. Just, when the player touches it they should loose - no HP in that early state.

I wanted two kinds of objects in the way: trees and rocks. The player needs the right tool to use on the objects. Axe for trees and watering can for... the rocks?! Eeeh, yeah, good question. I got distracted and built a blocky watering can. I was stupidly attached to it, kind of proud. I didn't model for some years ( I really liked 3D modelling in university, but hated weight painting too much) and I had fun stacking the blocks, I guess.

So I made a reason to use the watering can: for the the fire! You could try to save some time. But I had neither fire nor even the basic ability to pick up a tool yet. After that I focused getting the tools to use, on showing the right tool on the player, being able to switch and get rid of them. I wanted a nice script into which I could later on add more tools easily. So my script has a dictionary! It was a challenge to make it work, I learned a lot, but it was not worth the time. I could have just scraped the watering can and only use the axe ‚ just making it work. I was just reading in the book of lenses that you never built a proto with the goal of using it later. It’s just to state your idea and prove your concept.

Instead I next wanted nice UX and added a tiny animation on the watering can. It adds feedback for the player, when they pressed the button to use the tool. I think feedback is one of the most important things in good design - how else should the player learn and understand what is happening and why. But for my tough time schedule this was too much effort. I should just have added some ugly UI for now.

And then I had the problem, that things didn’t work consistently when playing. Sometimes I could change the tool just fine and sometimes I couldn't.
At this point I was already in my proto-3-week – you might see the problem here. In the proto-2-week I needed some time to finalise and publish my week 1 proto, but this time I was still working on basic features.
And then multiple personal things hit, one of them was that I got sick. I still wanted to make the proto work afterwards. I wasn’t ready to give up yet.

But now I'm on vacation and I realised: I still learned a lot! I will use these learnings for the next idea, reconsider the time frame and proto depending on that weeks schedule and just go on learning.
But for now I'm good. I failed, but it's okay.

You will see my next Game Challenge Proto folder in GitHub when I'm back.
See you around!

Sabine