[Video Contains Spoilers. The Game is a very short exploration game searching for 5 objects. When you know where they are, the game takes only a few minutes to beat. But if you have no intention of playing the game, you might enjoy this 3 minute video. The music changes every time you pick up one of the items.]
Game Dev Unlocked just had a 7 Day Game Launch Challenge, it was a course focused on getting your first game done and launched.
A lot of the curriculum was about thinking small, creating a space for someone to explore in a single sitting.
The plan was: use the Unity Asset Store to get free objects and set pieces and put them into your game, and just keep them all low-poly to make them work together. But I really felt like I wasn't able to express myself that way. Luckily a day or two into the challenge, I remembered that I had Asset Forge (which I bought on itch.io*) and I remembered that I loved the way my work looked in Asset Forge! The landing platform and the spaceship I already had made from last year, so that saved me some time; I just had to find ways to make them fit with the industrial corridor I built.
So much of the time was focused on technical difficulties, with one plugin not speaking to another, error here or there, etc. But there was never any problem with the Asset Forge stuff. It was the most fun part! Anytime I needed some new prop or something, I'd pop over to Asset Forge, smash a few things together, and export it back to Unity and I was able to keep working right away. It's everything I hoped it would be.
Heck, if I understood all the technical aspects of making a game, I'd have been using it in Unity last year when I bought Asset Forge! Though, really, I didn't appreciate the value of making short, exploration games until David at Game Dev Unlocked made the course focusing in on the validity of these short games. He kept talking about how you're offering someone a world to enter for a short time, one that didn't exist for them before; it's worth it.
If you want to play the game, it's on this itch page to download. I'm pretty sure it's windows/pc only.
Thanks for checking it out!
-Noah Wizard