Game Development – Introduction: Week 8
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With soon 10 weeks since the start of the project we’re now entering the final phase. For me that has meant a considerable amount of stress, with other courses taking up a large portion of my time but also time to go back and do some more low-key work redesigning some assets so this week I will be speaking about the seeds and the seed inventory-part of the GUI. When I first drew the seeds, it was the night before the GDD-hand in and the quickest way to illustrate the principle was to copy and paste the shape of a seed and add different patterns to show how they relate to their respective plants.
That particular design was never intended to be part of the final version and obviously we got critique on the design of the seeds. To clarify: The intended mechanic is that the Life Tree will spawn the seeds, the player will pick up and plant them and then they grow into a plant unit. So, going back over the design I’ve given the seeds different shapes that are intended to somewhat mimic the shape of the plant that seed will turn into. Sharp and long for the ranged plant, stocky with a neck protrusion for the impact type plant unit, etc. This makes them easier to identify but also makes the game more accesible to people with color blindness.
As for the seed inventory, it was intended to be fairly simple to keep focus on the seeds. The purpose of the seed inventory is to tell the player how many of each type of seed they currently have. So each seed will also have a leaf with a counter that keeps track of how many seeds the player currently has. Below is how the inventory looks with the seeds in it:
The second purpose of the seed inventory is to show which seed the player currently has selected. This is done with a simple glowing border. The player presses 1,2,3,4 to alternate between the plant unit types before planting them and the glowing outline moves with it.
As this might be the last blog post entry regarding this project, a general summary might be in order. We bit of more than we could chew. Despite downsizing the scope of our ambitions several times, we still have so far ended up implementing only a part of what we intended and even managing that has left us ridiculously little time to polish. It is regrettable but between losing team members, overestimating our abilities and badly timed illnesses it became incresingly clear that the concept we chose was out of our reach for now. On the bright side however, I think it was a very valuable learning experience for all team members, pushing us to set new limits for ourselves in both skill and endurance. BUT, with Theme Park coming up, one of the final lessons we had to learn was that sometimes you have to put people first and product second. Despite the game not turning out how we hoped, or perhaps because of it, the full extent of the importance of teamwork in game design became very clear to us. I guess I would call that a lesson worth “failing” for. Peace out! 🙂  |
