Dev Log 2

Development

I've been working on a VR cooking game with my girlfriend, and I've been trying to scramble to fit time to work on it around all my classes, so I have to admit that from as soon as I saw this is the only solo project in the syllabus, despite "space shooter" and "cooking game" being about as far apart as genres get, I started trying to think of ways I could bend what it's about so it would help with the development of the VR game. 

In the end, I'm actually pretty happy with how it came out! Food and shoot em ups actually go together better than I expected, as it turns out, although I guess the game stretches the limits of what actually constitutes cooking. 

Successes

While there's still a few significant bugs, I'm very happy with how finished the game feels; I think more than any other student game I've made, which is surprising considering how early we are in the semester still. I've kept thinking back to a year ago with the final project in my first semester as a DT student; I spent a week straight barely sleeping, doing almost nothing but working on the game I made back then, and in the end it still barely held together. So seeing where I am now feels pretty good! This took a few straight days of work (I hope it comes through when you play), but compared to that project was relatively quick, is way more complex in scope, and in the end feels so much more finished. Making this has me very excited to see where I’ll be a year from now.

Also just as an exercise in learning, I think this was really successful. Unfortunately I only put in 1 recipe per phase so it won’t really show through in the game, but I managed to make the recipe code in a way that’s really easy to expand on, and can randomize between recipes you have to do in each stage and so on. I’m sure 5 years from now I’ll be looking at my code and cringing all the same, but I feel like I made a fairly robust system in a way I’ve never really done before.

Failures

Okay so of course I have to follow up gloating about my code with the fact that it failed spectacularly during the presentation. I did manage to fix the bug that was breaking the level transitions (the death function I had would make a scene load repeatedly in update) but the fact it was an issue in the first place, and something so major so late in development, means I still have a lot to learn! I think in the future, I need to centralize major things like level loads, so they can’t be run by a random script I wasn’t paying attention to? And obviously test core functions like level transitions ahead of time--I didn’t actually make levels 2 and 3 until relatively late.

The emotions showing through was also a huge failure, considering it’s central to the assignment and all. My plans for that mostly revolved around the level theming, which I had big plans for but only just barely managed to squeeze in, and definitely not to the extent that different emotions might actually show. 

Another failure was the presentation, I feel like, and unfortunately a lot of this not-directly-gamedev classwork. I worked really hard on the actual development part of this project, but I feel like that tends to put me in a state of mind where I stop thinking about things like devlogs and presentations, don't check my email, and completely forget that I was supposed to have this posted a day ago.

What I learned

I feel like the biggest thing was bringing the project to completion in a way I haven’t really done before. When I was playtesting, I was actually having fun! It feels like that should be so obvious for game design, but I’ve never had that experience with past games I’ve made. I think this project has really helped me get a firm footing on a lot of basic stuff in Unity, to the point that what in previous semesters felt like a chaotic process doesn’t really anymore. I’ll definitely benefit from better planning, managing deadlines better, and so on, but that feels less like a hopeless goal and now more like something I’ll actually be able to start doing.