Mr Mayor's Energy Crisis Post Mortem

[raw] LD39LDJam 11. Aug 2017 · 07:08 UTC · 14 days after compo start by HuvaaKoodia · 4

The ducks are back, this time in a supporting role.

The day before

Installed Unity 2017.1 and started playing around with the novel features. Had an idea for a time travelling shmup using the shiny new Timeline feature, but it wasn't quite as neat and simple as expected (the timeline scripting API is still in its infancy). Still, that was my backup plan if the theme would fit and I, for some reason, had no better ideas.

The design

Came together pretty fast in the morning of the first day and the core ideas were certainly very interesting. Had a design document down within an hour containing all the required mechanics and a few more which were cut later. Some ideas, like the newspaper, came up later in the day (designated as nice to have!) after hacking in the basic systems.

The basic systems

Were hacked in on the first day. It was not pretty, a text based GUI for debugging and no graphics, but it worked. Had the crisis take 30 days initially, which turned out to be way too long for the amount of content I managed to make in the end so it was toned down to two weeks.

Graphics

Were a high priority this time too. The buildings were done and dusted by the end of the first day. The eagle had to way for the next morning (too tired). The ground was the last 3D asset and it required tweaking even in the evening of the third day.

The eagle isn't very visible in the final product so here it is in all its low-def glory!

GUI 2.0

Less text, less buttons, more icons. There you have it. Took some thinking, but it works. The only unused asset in the whole project was made for the GUI:

Had no time to make any positive events, so the happy face doesn't show up ever. It is already in the code though.

Newspaper

Writing! More writing than I've ever done for any project before. In fact there is so much writing here that I consider it the main attraction of the project itself. The management side is very simple, but seeing your choices affect the town and its people is the interesting bit. At least that is the way I see it.

Issues?

Uh, not really.

Interesting tech?

Used AnimationCurves and Serialized objects to great effect in the world stats update and the events database. Will have write ups for both of those in the near future.