So now that I've finished the game but before judging starts I think I'm going to go through and talk about what's going on in this prototype of a game I created. What went right and what went wrong. If you don't want spoilers before you play the game then don't read past the first question. I pull back the curtain in a lot of ways and talk about content, and the entire point of the game is exploration.
Where can I get this game?
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/fuoxtictnp4oihy/AACNBSeB2rNGmCOg-xL-QUiva?dl=0
Sorry for the file size, there's a lot of unnecessary files in there that I didn't have the time to remove.
What does this have to do with the theme?
It was a lot better in my head. Each room is supposed to be a biome. There's snow, water (ocean), a grassy area, some sandy areas, but I kind of ran out of time to really flesh everything out. It still fits in that it's just 8 rooms and the level is a self contained "world" but I was aiming for more of a human sized terrarium rather than what I got. Oh well.
What went wrong with the development?
Oh boy, a lot of things. I started making a different game, a clone of that old CS 1.6 map Rats. But after spending time modeling the character I realized what a big mistake I had made and scrapped the whole thing and went with my number two choice, the 4D Hypercube. Then I spent several hours trying to make seamless portals A-la valve's Portal, that way you don't have to crawl into a smaller cube and close the door to go to a different room. and you would just get seamless transportation from one room to the next. I was able to get the teleportation to work pretty well but there was 1 frame of lag with the scene capture component that I could not get to go away. Not to mention that scene capture hit's the game's performance harder than freight train. I wasted a lot of time with that when I should have gone with the easier option which I eventually did go with.
I also worked on visuals and aesthetics before I worked on mechanics. If I had worked on mechanics first I may have actually had a fade-to-black ending rather than just "you get the word 'gold medal' in your inventory and a victory sound plays". I may have even let the player eat the meal they cooked. But alas, I had to make the grass look nice instead. Calling the ending anticlimactic would be an understatement.
The scope also was crazy out of control, which I though would happen and it did happen. I wanted to put in so much more than actually made it into the game.
What went right with the development?
I finished. I didn't finish what I wanted to finish, but I finished nonetheless.
What went wrong with the actual game?
When making the material for many of the floors I used World Displacement and Tessellation. to give the floors texture. This had the unexpected drawback of what can be seen below. Where there is a gap between the floor and the shaft. It's ugly, and if I had just removed the World Displacement then the problem would have gone away, but I didn't.
Next is the glitch that happens if you decide to teleport with an item selected in your inventory, which should happen more than once. Because the unselected items are white they blend right in, but the center dot and the selected item stand out. I guess I could make the excuse that those things are in the mind of the character, and thus aren't whited out when they teleport like their vision is, but it just doesn't look very nice.
The next problem isn't something that's there, but rather something that isn't there. I tried adding ambient sounds but it would either bleed into the adjacent rooms or not play at all. Having the water room contain ocean sounds, the grassy room contained the sound of wind blowing and the tree room contain the sound of birds chirping would have really added to the whole thing, but I would rather have no sound than all sounds layered on top of one another in every room.
When you teleport the buttons sometimes switch which side of the teleportation room the player is on. The player randomly rotating isn't a bug, I added that intentionally to cover my tracks with how the rooms are connected. But sometimes you walk in one door, and then seemingly walk out of the same door. Switching the side of the room the buttons are on, with that being the only thing you really have to orient yourself in that room, would make it seem like you walk in one door and then walk out of a different door. If I were to polish this game in the future I would add a boolean I could tick on or off in the level edditor to switch the side of the teleportation portal door room things to make the whole thing flow better.
When you pick up the saucepan there are actually eggs in there, but they are invisible. You can actually pick those invisible eggs up an indefinite amount of times. This gives you access to infinite eggs, when you are only supposed to have access to the three you pick up in that one room containing literally nothing other than a table and three eggs. At least hypercube dude won't starve, but I'm sure he'll get sick of hardboiled eggs eventually.
When opening or closing the portal door, the button doesn't become un-clickable when red, and you can spam it, making the door restart it's animation.
In the room with grass the portal on the floor is useless. You can open the door but you can't go inside. That's because the terrain is blocking it, it's just transparent. If I had turned off collision that would have solved the problem, but I forgot.
You don't have to put water in the vase with the flower.
The trees don't have collision. You can walk right through them.
There are instances where the portal doors when opening or closing don't push the player when they should. Instead they go right through the player.
What went right with the actual game?
Quite a few things, surprisingly enough.
I really like almost everything about the inventory system. If I were to spend more time with it I'd figure out how to make it so I don't have to create two objects for every item, but other than that it's all good. The clicking sound of scrolling through the inventory and zipper sound when putting items in are both things I really like. It's also fairly intuitive (at least for me), if you want to use a specific item you scroll to it and then click. Any item that's in you're inventory you can see on the right hand side of your screen. I also think I did a pretty good job with making it clear which item was selected, by having it slightly larger and a different color than all the other items.
I like the item interaction system. Having items be outlined when you can use them and then you just click to interact is pretty intuitive (again, at least to me). It removes the whole "can I click on this?" and "what exactly am I clicking on" because the line trace that is used to highlight objects and the line trace that is used to actually select the item are essentially the same. You can also select specific components instead of selecting the entire item, which is nice. It's why you can select the handle and buttons for the portal but not the door. This system kind of falls apart with large items like when filling the Jerry Can with water, but all in all it works fairly well.
I like many of the sound elements I managed to squeeze into the game in the last minute. Lack of ambient sound notwithstanding, the sound of the door opening, the buttons clicking, the hotplate turning on, and teleporting all turned out fairly well. I wish there wasn't that high pitched hum when opening the door, and having some squeaky sound when turning the handle instead of just the rumble would have been nice as well, but all in all I think the sound design is passable.
