Week 2 of Dev Game

In the second week of our game development journey, we have solidified our game concept and embarked on a journey of creative exploration. Here’s a recap of the week’s events and accomplishments: I picked the frog idea and developed it into a more solid concept. Using the three game pillars we agreed on week 1, I went through an ideation process to establish the mechanics of the character, story, and esthetics. I developed a prototype in Unity to validate the mechanic.

I put together a proposal selection session to review each person’s concept and vote for the preferred option. We met, presented the concepts, and decided to go with a time-related mechanic in a 3D FP view.

On Thursday, we had a checkpoint with our supervisor, who encouraged us to focus on the time mechanics as the only way for the user to attack. We all agreed that this limitation is worth exploring. We divided our efforts into two exploration work streams: time-control mechanics and shaders for visual identity and a third parallel stream to build a presentation for an elevator pitch on Monday, April 8th.

Before starting the time mechanics, I proposed building a base playground with the basic first-person controllers already implemented so we all had the same codebase. I teamed up with Zarco to build this sandbox. Collectively decided what the playground should have and prioritized the key features. We used Unity Starter Assets for Character Controllers as the codebase to streamline the process.

We booked 4 to 5 hours of work. I had some issues with my C# SDK configuration that blocked the repository from being pushed to GitHub. So Zarco pushed the project from his Windows PC, and I cloned it in my local. The .gitingore file created from GitHub worked really well. Zarco added moving enemies and a crosshair while I implemented the two input actions for a primary and secondary attack. Zark and I also documented how to use the playground on FigJam.

Although we finished the base playground by 5, the tricky part was going through the code and re-arranging the files, moving the assets from the third-party package to the project’s assets without breaking the game. I reorganized the folder based on a Unity article and my teammates’ advice about best practices for organizing projects. Once everything worked smoothly, I configured the GitHub repository as a template and released it to the team on Saturday morning.

Lastly, I solved my Mac’s DotNet SDK problem by installing the latest version compatible with M2 and including the DotNet SDKs’ PATHs in the ZSH configuration file.

export PATH="/usr/local/share/dotnet:$PATH"
export DOTNET_ROOT="/opt/homebrew/Cellar/dotnet/8.0.1"
export PATH=$PATH:$DOTNET_ROOT:$DOTNET_ROOT/tools

Next steps:

• Use the playground to prototype several time mechanics.
• Discuss the mechanics that each one of us prototyped.
• Review the shader’s exploration.
• Research and document our game’s unique selling points and assemble the visual identity with Samuel for the elevator pitch.
• Researching on who to set up a team account on Itch or any other indie Game hosting service.
• Deploy an early playable version of the prototype on Saturday.