Mesolithic

Dev Notes/Retrospective: 

Jam: 2021 game Parade    Theme: "Strength lies in differences"

Completely solo on this game jam project. Doing programming, sound, music, 2d art, textures, design, and implementation in Unity all by oneself is exhausting.

Theme:  The theme is covered by learning from and working together with animals to solve (admittedly easy) puzzles.  The idea is that humanity would be nothing without the ability to learn from the natural world.  I focused more on creating an experience and narrative than making the mechanics "fun".  I used the time period of approximately 10,000-30,000 as a basis for the game assets.  

Programming :  Programming suffered a little due to spending so much time on art.  It works, but the code is ugly.  The coding, for all it's flaws, works as intended with very few issues (The game should always be completable (with both win and lose conditions) and never* error).  As for the "JUMP" mechanic.  I purposely chose to limit movement while in mid air (original-Castlevania-style).  It just made sense in this concept.   I'm more of  a systems-level programmer and I didn't really get to show off any of my fancy system-building skills here.  There are some in the source, but many aren't actually used as it was quicker to do things the wrong way rather than the better long-term solution. *Break it, I dare you.

The UI:  You might say, "What UI?"  and I say, "Yes, isn't it fantastic?"  I enjoy minimal UI design.  I hate when screens fill up with sliders and progress bars when other elements can give the player the same information.  Yes, the text probably should have faded over time, but I didn't want my players to get lost by not reading quickly enough.  The one flaw that is present is that there is no indicator of how long you need to perform an action...my bad, but it is always 2.5-5 seconds (with some variance for processing time as some depend on framerate rather than an explicit time check) provided you are within a close enough range to the target receiving the action.

Audio : I am getting better at sound design.  I'm pretty happy with my sound effects, and the setting allowed me to be a bit experimental with the music, although staying close to instruments available during the Mesolithic era.  To a non-musical person there may be an uncomfortable amount of off-beats and discordance at times, but I wanted my early hominid melodies to not strictly represent what we think of as good music today.  I did overall feel limited in the instrument selection, as I only used a basic midi library from MuseScore.

Level Design : ...wasn't really done.  It is minimal.  This could be an expansive single-level puzzle platformer if I had 20 more hours to work on it.  Also, not enough things are prefabs.  I did a lot of in-scene editing as there wasn't a need for a lot of reuse of the same assets.  The game progress should at least be discernable through context, although there is not helpful reminder of the controls if you forget (or fail to read the prompt before it gets replaced).

Used Assets : Fonts used are free for personal use at dafont.com.  Some background art was taken from photos of real cave art and edited for use in the game. Everything else was 100% me.  It should be pretty clear what is created by me and what is not. (read: which can be recreated by your average toddler is my art, photographs look like photographs).   Art and textures were created and edited using Paint 3D... like a real pro.

Design : The choice to use 2.5D was in part a limitation of my own artistic capabilities, which still wanting some level of depth.  I think the added depth works well with the concept.  I especially enjoyed working with the layer order and shadows (with working daylight and a moving fire as light sources).  I am certain some of the shadows are a bit off, but fixing them during the jam would have yielded too little impact for effort.

Limitations :  In the end, due to time constraints, I cut an event that would interact with a raven and see the player transform and fly away to represent the player's cycle of life ending and adding in a bit of mythology.  I don't think the experience suffers for not having it, but it certainly would have been cool.  The code would have taken all of 20 mins, but creating the art assets is a challenge for me.  

No digital animals were harmed by the player in the making of this game. Other animals however, did get a bit hungry.