Description

The goal of this game is to collect creatures and... keep them alive.

Some Background

So I wasn't able to complete this project in time so I am publishing what I managed to accomplish thus far. With a combination of school and life, I over estimated what I thought I could do. I would consider this project a failure on that front. However, I really enjoyed participating in the jam. I learned so much more in the last four days than I have in the last three months as far as game development goes. Bellow I'm going to list out the features I wanted to accomplish for this jam vs. what I actually managed to do. Also, all of my source code and assets are available on the Git repo I linked onto this page. You can play the current build on itch.io. Its a rough one to say the least.

I am a student majoring in Computer and Information Science, this was a personal goal of mine to finally participate in my first game jam. I chose to do this on my own, and to do everything essentially from scratch except for building an actual game engine (I mean come on, that would be crazy right.... right?). I went in and as soon as I saw the theme for this jam I immediately knew what kind of game I wanted to make.

The Game

Pocket Rancher is a game about collecting and raising creatures. You play as a Rancher, and as you build up your farm you will slowly encounter rarer and more unique wildlife. You can basically think of it as a more in depth Tamogachi / Digimon simulator. For this jam I wanted to complete a small environment where you could plant one or two crops to grow and feed your creatures while they randomly spawned around you, the longer you played and the higher your score the greater the quantity and rarity of the creatures you would come across. Your score would be determined by the number of crops you managed to grow, the number of creatures you managed to collect, as well as how long you played. If all of the creatures you collected had died, or if all of your crops had withered away then that would be considered a loose condition and the game would end and your final score would display.

List of Desired Features for The Jam

• three unique creatures to collect
• ability to grow at least two different kinds of crops
• player inventory, movement, entity interaction, animations
• Entity movement AI and collision
• ability for player to lay down soil
• Scoring system
• Basic main menu and quit screen
• Loose condition
• Assets for Environment, Player, Creatures, and Inventory menu screen
• (this totally sounds random but I had a stretch goal of an options menu to rebind keys)

What I Managed To Do

• Basic main menu and quit screen
• Player Movement
• Some Assets for environment tiles
• one creature (its design)
• player and player movement animations
• Basic entity movement (collision is funky sometimes)

Keep in mind that this list of things does not describe the quality of the things. Everything is in a rough state, but I'm proud of what I was able to accomplish.

Thank you to who ever decides to painfully play the "game" I created. I will continue development of this little project until I loose all creative will to do so. If you have extensive knowledge of Unity and happen to view my source code please critique (constructively) the living heck out of it.