Indie game storeFree gamesFun gamesHorror games
Game developmentAssetsComics
SalesBundles
Jobs
Tags

Post mortem - SimsLife

A topic by CreativaGS created Nov 03, 2020 Views: 131
Viewing posts 1 to 1
Submitted

At first I was working on the last game I uploaded.
Later on I discovered some skecthes that I had made for the second part of one of my games  (https://creativags.itch.io/life-cycle) and I found it  was interesting to work on those sketches and ideas.



I wanted to make a recolorable game, where you can personalize almost every bit on the player's house, including you.

I started to play with an unfinished engine i had on hiatus and the project started.

This is just a demo and it was harder than i though because movement is isometric and i haven't even done something like that before. in fact is something i have to polish later on but it was fun to make animations and mirror them, also calculate where the stupid hair should be, it continues switching places from one view to another.

I've, definitely,  discovered those kind of games require a few more work on positioning, coordinates and scale.


Also i' ve found a simple an reliable way to color items and upgraded the old system that was on hiatus. I used hex inserted into a variable that let's you recolor a gray button and then pick this variable and set to the furniture or clothes. At first i was using values for each color and called them from a data base, but then i found it was easy to implement them right into the variables of the button. Lastly i mixed both ideas and i had a color pallete that could be called right from events, and i just need to declare this variable from object to make only one procedure for coloring.

My main goal was stablish a base game that serves as foundation for sim life emulation, where player interacts with objects and regains hunger, higiene, sleep and other needs.This was a challenge because i wanted the events to be activated mainly from one direction but also have the chance to work from any side, like bed, again this was solved by setting a variable that tells the program wich side is the one you will consider to interact, but there was the problem with coordinates, character activates the furniture from unsuspected directions, this was solved by changing the collision points on the objects and have some collision points for the character to avoid passing through them and other for the character to interact with them.

Drawing isometrics was fun but there were some issues about scale that i corrected making a cubed module, I made some objects that i did not incorporate to the demo, but they will be on the finished version of this also with some features i want to add later on.

What did i learned from Devtover jam?

Even when i did not continued working on the first project that i picked for this jam starting something completely new teached me new tricks and skills also now i have a few new engines that i could use for another project.

I started to make independent modules that could be reused, this way i will save a lot of time


The best lesson i learned is.. keep on working on the project make a little advance daily and, if possible stick to that project. Yeah i learned that because i switched, because mistakes let you learn more than perfection.