[Post-mortem] Room for thought
Game can be found here! https://mythridate.itch.io/room-for-thought
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I want to say right off the bat, I'm very pleased with the result of the game- even though I've been staring at it for days straight for the past week, I was still completely taken aback at the fact that I actually made something! As soon as I hit build and play, my eyes shot open and I ran around the room as if it were my first time playing it. I can't express how happy I am with the result of the game, despite it being just a few minutes long. My friend put it well, describing it as "a pleasant little bite of time".
Something you'll notice right off the bat is the fact that you kind of have to stretch your imagination when it comes to the objects in question. Sure, the paper is shaped like a paper and the books are in a bookshelf, but alone they're just a bunch of weird shapes and planes. Ideally, I wanted the visuals to look similar to those of the Katamari games.
Image from Katamari Items.
They have this odd, low poly, low res texture charm to it (which I love), but unfortunately I couldn't optimize a way to create many differentiating textures for the items since I had trouble with unwrapping the UVs and essentially getting lost in all the faces. I did attempt it on two clothing articles though, shown below.
Although it didn't quite pan out, there's not much lost from the lack of shirt textures.
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The title Room for thought came to me as literally as you would expect it- you're in a room, thinking about all this stuff. I speculated lightly on a meaning behind it but the simplicity describes as much as I would need it to.
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As for the game itself in regards to my initial goal, I believe I got as close as I could within the limit! It's true that I noted I wanted our character to be looking at all sorts of nonsense in her room, one of the things being collectibles. There is a disturbing lack of collectibles (as well as personal items in general) and while it is truthfully because I physically could not model fast enough to get everything I wanted in there, it oddly falls into the setting of the game quite well. Persi pondering the things in her room that is barren of all things that could describe the person is somewhat a reflection of myself- in that I tend to have a hidden feeling that things I make aren't infused with my personality enough. It was here that I added the fact that Persi and her partner Dorianne recently moved in. The cardboard boxes, the lack of things filling the room, the bare, poster-less walls, the overall cleanliness of it all indicates this fact and contributes to the wandering around.
This gap between just moving in and her already packing for a different, unnamed trip shortly afterwards gives off a strange out of place feeling. Visually, (in terms of the models and colors) I believe the game looks comfortable, but spacial-y it's disconcerting.
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Honestly, this game isn't up to snuff regarding my original idea, but it's an amazing starting point. I learned a lot from wrestling with C# to figuring out what blurbs to write. While I wanted this to be a full-fledged narrative driven point-and-click, the narrative was lost due to the fact that I couldn't implement an event where Dorianne would text Persi (in the form of some sort of pop-up UI) from time to time. It was this combined with the lack of models that I had to wriggle out some sort of explanation for the lack of, well, everything in-game.
Despite what I originally intended not making it into the game, I'm still completely satisfied with the outcome of the game! I would love to expand on this idea since I'm very attached to it, so Room for thought is just a prototype of hopefully more to come, and I have My First Game Jam to thank for throwing me in a time limit to do the thing I've been putting off forever.
My completely obvious nod to My First Game Jam.