Mini Dungeon - 1 Day Challange

Controls

Move: WASD

Attack: Arrow Keys

Use UI: Mouse and Left Mouse Button

Rules to the challenge I gave to myself

1. No physical work completed outside of the day long window
   1. Ideas in the brain are ok
   2. This includes downloaded assets
2. Have a "completed" product by the end of the day

Postmortem

Yeah, I made this game in 1 day! It was fun! 

The 3skills I wanted to practice with this challenge are:

1. Completing Projects
2. Rapid Game Design and Prototyping
3. Time management

I'm gonna do a little postmortem here to go over how it went, some notes, some issues I ran into in a 1 day game dev time frame, as well as some future adjustments that I am going to make to the game.

How did it go?

I'm pretty proud of it in the end. I think for the time frame I had, I got a lot done and learned a lot of valuable lessons along the way. In the end, it ended up being more like a rapid prototype than a fully fleshed out game, but that's ok! I went into it knowing it wouldn't have a lot of art or well fleshed out visuals, I focused fully on mechanics. 

As the mechanics stand though, I think there are a lot of things I'd like to change in the future (which I will cover in more detail in the last section of this postmortem). The biggest note I want to make though is that I did not playtesting within this one day timeframe. Looking back on it would've been a fantastic thing to fit in to make the game feel as good as possible by the end of the day, and will definitly be something I work into my future one day challenges.

In terms of scope, I think I did a pretty good job of coming up with an idea that was bite sized enough to complete. 3 features were cut in the end, being:

• Different weapon types
• Power bar
• Cuttable grass or vines for collectables

In the end I realized these would just be too much work to fit into the build sadly. That's ok, we learn for next time.

Issues I ran into

Some of the biggest setbacks to the process were actually complete changes to mechanics that I made mid development. This was time consuming, not only to make the change, but it also meant all of the time I spent making the initial code went to waste.

The best example of this being the movement system. Initially the movement system for the player and enemies were grid based. I had completed making the player's movement, but once I moved onto the enemy movement I realized how much quicker it would be to move the enemies using the nav-mesh system built into unity instead of making my own coded AI behavior. I am not the most well versed in AI scripting, so it probably would've taken me all day to do this.

With the enemies no longer on a grid system, the player's movements had to then be changed to ridgidbody forces. Doing this made a new problem arise though, being that I had not set up the level generator to generate with boundaries, meaning the player could fall right off the side of the world. A new system then had to be made to make these boundaries.

The biggest lesson here is that when you are in a huge time constraint, stick to what you know. Learning, although important, is a time consuming process if you want to do it right. If I didn't have to go through all of these changes would I have been able to get all of the mechanics in that I had to cut? Yeah, maybe. That's ok though, I learned a valuable lesson for my future projects.

The final issue I want to mention is the lack of playtesting. I stated this before, and I will talk about it again, but I think working playtesting into the process would've given me valuable information that would've helped me in the development's final moments. The end was quite a scramble, as I went back and fourth adjusting values and adding things I thought would help with quality of life. Playtesting beforehand, instead of going off of my own playthroughs in the end, would've allowed me to note these final adjustments down, and plan a schedule on creating these changes.

Future Changes and New Features

I will eventually come back to this game, and make some adjustments. I think how the game stands, there are a lot of features that are missing, or things I'd like to adjust. As stated before, this game had no playtesting, which I think will add a huge amount of value to both the development process, and the game's design.

3 features were cut in the end which will all be created in the future, being:

• Different weapon types
  • Shield
  • Spear
  • Placables
• Power bar and special move
• Cuttable grass or vines for collectables

Some changes I would love to make:

• Level generation adjustments
  • Make level generator more circular
  • add branching paths
• Chest Generation adjustments
  • Chests only spawn in outcrops
  • Guarded by enemies
• Enemy Aggro Ranges
  • As it stands you basically fight the enemies at the entrance to the level
• Enemy Attacks
  • Actual enemy attacks 

• Skill screen - next level enemy stats
• General UI Upgrading
• Visual Effects
  • Attacks (enemy and player)
  • Blood
  • Gold gain
  • Chest opening
  • Door opening
• Animations
• Art
• SFX