This stage of developement has necessarily been primarily a study in programming skills and design patterns for games. I learned a lot about creating event driven state machines, delegates, pathfinding, using singletons, and more. All of these things are currently incorporated into the game and will influence the development I plan to continue on it after this course.
This game ended up being WAY harder than I had initially hoped. I thought I picked a really simple design to work on but Unity still is really not suited well to this kind of game. I spent a lot of time getting tilemaps and pathfinding doing what I wanted and Iโm still having problems with them.
Actually building the game has informed and changed a lot of ideas that I had when it was only a concept. The idea of โtrapsโ on the map that I brought in from animals chess has morphed into a more elegant water tile that interrupts scent trails for animals that cross it. The idea of a looping hierarchy that I got from animals chess has become less important conceptually too. Iโve started doing some serious thinking and reading about how I want to frame the ideas of predation that the game deals with before I go too far down a design road without centering what meanings Iโm communicating. The game definitely plays with ideas of power and resistance, and I plan to keep those ideas in mind as I make mechanical decisions about gameplay.
Finally I had initially approached this game thinking that I would incorporate a lot of traditional animation and now I am kind of attached to some of the visual simplicity of it. Itโs very much like a board game bolted onto a piece of interactive fiction at the moment and Iโd like to hold on to some of that feeling.
Addendum - It looks like my build is getting errors that playing in the game view in Unity doesnโt get? I set the build to development mode to try to figure it out.
