Posted March 05, 2018 by valanars
The game is about picking out snacks if you have a peanut allergy! A lot of things are easy to rule out (the literal peanut, the Reese’s Cocoa Puffs cereal), but there’s also some cross contamination that is involved. Basically, I wanted to make a game where players had to think about what they could eat before just clicking randomly— the only way to “win” is to have not ingested any peanuts by the game’s end. It’s… sort of an educational game in that sense. I just wanted to make a game where you kinda get the sense of, hey, you really can’t tell if something’s safe by just a glance, especially in the case of some items that look identical, but one is deadly and the other not.
Problems! There were… a ton of them. I had issues with the camera, issues with scripting, and issues with anything that could be an issue. —I’m mostly joking, but I really did run into a lot of errors with my scripts. My initial “eating” script involved me attempting to use a lengthy mouse-tracking script that was unfortunately also tied to… rotating the camera. Basically, the player would look around as they tried to click something, usually to no avail. To fix this, I completely removed the player character and put a raycast script onto the main camera which is much shorter and works way, way better. Other issues included players thinking the game was too easy in playtesting (because, hey, I color coded the objects for myself. That’s on me), one person requesting to eat a Tide Pod, Unity not loading in textures on imported Maya models (though with a bit of research, I found a fix to that), and, of course, my 999 attempts to model a peanut.
If I had more time, I would really want to make a pickup/inspection script, where players can rotate objects around to read labels and ingredients on items. I cut this idea because it was a bit beyond what I currently understood in code, so if I had done it, I would’ve just been copy/pasting without really learning anything. So I didn’t! I’d also loved to have done more visual work on this game. 3D modeling is the polar opposite of my forte (I’m a 2D artist who is absolutely terrible at anything outside that medium), but I really do wish I had the time to sit down, figure out Maya’s other functions, and make some actually decent looking food. I do kinda like that low poly fish, though. I thought it was cute.