This week was a touch slower – I spent a bit less time on the keyboard and a bit more time.. well, also on the keyboard, but thinking over my direction. In fact, I spent an entire day without physically progressing any development and just thinking and planning. Good job I’m not in a hurry.
Where I’m at
I’ve just started my third prototype and it’s going well so far. It’s still early days into that, so I don’t have enough information to determine if I’m heading in the right direction, but I’m feeling quite positive about it so far.
I’m also starting work on the visual design for the game, trying to come up with concepts for how the game as a whole should look.
What I Planned
My objective was to complete the second prototype and determine if the conveyor-based simulation concept was a viable concept to continue developing.
I wasn’t sure what the next step was, so the plan was left fairly open-ended to continue as needed after that was done.
What Actually Happened
The first couple of days this week saw work continue on the second prototype. I started to get worried that the gameplay core I was focusing on wasn’t actually going to be all that fun to work with – and by the time Tuesday evening had come around, I had enough of the prototype together to get a feel for this.
For starters, placing the conveyors by selecting between a few predefined types, rotating them and clicking to place them one at a time was slow and clunky. I already know that, but I stuck it out for the benefit of completing the prototype. By the time I had the queuing and merging working fully, it was pretty clear that this wasn’t going to work as the main focus of the game – for three main reasons:
- The endless supply of resources, while visually interesting, doesn’t make sense and creates problems when the output area doesn’t want a certain material.
- Once you ‘solve’ the routing problem, it’s done – there’s nothing more to do.
- Beyond placing conveyors, there’s no player control over what happens. Want to stop the red balls getting to the end? You can’t
So I spent Wednesday thinking up how to pivot into a more fun focus, and I think I’ve found my next area to consider. It goes like this:
- Conveyors are placed with a click & drag in a line. Connections are made automatically
- I’ll add packing stations where resources are boxed up and dispatched to the output bay via the conveyors
- Items on the conveyor will pathfind and route to their destination automatically
- To make up for losing control of the routing, the player instead will schedule orders on a calendar and manage delivery bays
That’s the general overview anyway. In short, conveyor routing wasn’t the right focus to have, so instead I’ll focus on managing logistics and scheduling. I’ve written pages and pages, breaking down the game into small systems of work (probably overkill) and determining how these will all interact with each other. I’ve put a mind map together for the features of the game with a bunch of little notes.
Redoing the conveyor logic was fairly straightforward, since I could reuse the models and much of the code I had already created, so it didn’t take long to get close to where the previous prototype left off.
Towards the end of the week, I also spent a little time looking into the visual direction for this game. Mostly by way of a mood board. I have a concept of the general theme I’m going for, but I need to find a way to put that into something concrete. I found ArtStation, which seems to be a great source for concepts and I’ve spent an hour or so filtering through what this has to offer.
What Went Wrong
I don’t feel like any major disaster happened this week. Sure, I felt like the whole project was doomed on Tuesday evening, but by the next day I had figured out the plan.
I suppose if I were to nit-pick, I could suggest that I should have realised the second prototype wasn’t fun a little sooner. I was already suspecting that it wasn’t fun a few days before, but I pushed through in case one of the non-completed tasks would provide that bit of extra fun. It didn’t, and a lot of the work that went into that prototype isn’t usable for the next one.
What Went Right
I didn’t continue developing the second prototype, just because some boxes were left unchecked. I learned the answer to the question it posed before needing to work in the final aspects, and stopped as soon as I realised that.
Since I was able to reuse quite a bit of the code from the second prototype, getting up to speed on a fresh prototype was quite straightforward
What Next?
Well, it might be a little boring to say, but continue the third prototype is largely my plan. I have a solid set of systems to build out to make it happen and I expect it will take most of the week, if not some of the following week too.
I’d also like to continue working on the visual aspect of this game. I’d like to continue looking into this, as long as it doesn’t impact the prototype development work. I may save the fourth prototype for the art style and aesthetics of the game.