Devlog 6

For the final week, I decided that I had to go into overdrive; Talking to my tutors, I was recommended that rather than finishing the mechanics of the game such as fixing the inventory, as well as incorporating the puzzles, that I should instead focus on making sure that I had a functioning, fully-working game with a complete narrative. I must admit that I wasn’t exactly ecstatic with that decision, but I decided that it was the best course of action considering the limited amount of time that I had. I also decided that as a part of that, I needed to focus more on designing the art assets as well, making sure that each person and background item fit into the distinctive style that I had created. In addition, I also focused on making sure that the character’s dialogue not only worked, but was concise. I was able to talk to Lindsay in regards to setting up the dialogue system, but I was able to figure out the problem with the bug without his help during the lecture. Even if it was something as simple as making sure that the dialogue was working properly, it was still something that I was able to completely solve by myself, and it honestly goes to show how much I have improved when it comes to problem solving and learning the Unity language, and considering I had only started learning the language in July, I like to think that it’s a sign that I have come a long way.

The main challenge that I had faced during this week, aside from making sure that I was able to get everything done and sorted before handing it in was fixing up a strange bug within the dialogue system: I was unable to somehow get more than one dialogue item in one room at the time, as somehow  both speakers would then speak the same dialogue regardless of which person the player was interacting with. This, however, was solved simply by making some more rooms to store each speaker object, as I figured it would be a much more effective and quicker solution than if I were to spend hours trial and error-ing the entire dialogue system.

Overall, I feel like my satisfaction with this game is a bit of a hit or miss; on one hand, I’m glad with being able to incorporate the story in its entirety, and that I was able to write a compelling narrative. In addition, I’m happy and proud of the quirky designs I’ve come up with for each character; I can assuredly say that no character looks like one that belongs to an already existing game. On the other hand, I’m also a tad disappointed that I couldn’t properly incorporate everything that I had set out to do with my game pitch; namely the puzzles, proper inventory, and the music that I spent a decent chunk of time on. I’ve learned some valuable lessons: make sure that you have enough time to accommodate in your schedule to do you project, and make sure that you work fully on your mechanics first prior to doing anything like designs or music.

Would I go back and work more on the game after this project? Considering that I had finished working on the game’s story, I don’t think there would be anything that I could do to expand on it in a meaningful way. Would I revisit the world and the characters, however? Maybe. I’m not entirely too sure at the moment, but it’s entirely possible. Lorraine and Kenjiro are fairly unique people, so I might be able to take away something good to use again from this project.

I hope you all enjoy!