gametools2journal

[gametools2journal]

Corrupted Vision

The idea I have for this week's prototype is that the player plays as a mayor who wants to make good decisions for their city. Doing this is stressful and so occasionally they will have to make bribed decisions to make money to reduce their stress. My initial idea was that the player would be given three decisions to make, and each decision would have a unique minigame attached to them that the player would have to complete. This would take too long to make for the time given so I’m settling on each decision giving the player a string of arrow keys they must press, with more difficult decisions having longer strings.    The main thing I want to find from playtesters is if they found the gameplay loop of the game engaging. Making decisions based on the available decisions and the state of your different resource bars.    Unfortunately, I was not able to attend the playtest, but I still gained insight from completing the prototype. The basis of the code for the game is referencing index’s of lists of GameObjects and ints, because this is what I’m used to doing from doing Computer Science in Leaving Cert. I realised that I need to get a better understanding of Unity and C# so I’m not just coding in a Python way, and so I’ll need to step outside of my comfort zone. This is something I want to focus on for this module’s main project as I’d have ample time to learn and experiment with code. 

[gametools2journal]

Controls

The base idea I have for this week's prototype is for the player to control an object, and the position of that object controls the movement of another object. I want to do this in the form of a player-controlled ball going around a gear shift shaped maze, where each end of the maze would activate a control for a car. Forward, back, turning left and turning right. My initial idea was to have the ball controlled by WASD movement, but I think that would lead to clunky controls so instead I will have the ball track to the player's mouse. This will allow the player to make quick control changes and focus more on the car's position rather than just getting the ball around the maze. Another thing I deduced is that in this control scheme, it would be necessary to have moving forward be a toggle, since only one control can be active at a time. The player shouldn’t have to stop the car to turn.    The main thing I want to ask about is does the unique controls feel like fun gameplay or does it just feel annoying to use.    I didn’t get the mouse tracking to work in time and had to settle for WASD ball movement. Since the maze view was of a render texture on a UI element, using ScreenToWorldPoint to get the ball to track to the mouse didn’t work properly. Despite this, most playtesters still found the gameplay fun.