Chapter 4

I had great hopes and expectations for day 4. It turns out there was a lot of hit and miss, and I have mixed feelings about where I stand with this game in the competition:

On the one hand, I got a lot done:

- The 'Evil Eraser' is now functional (it is the second dynamic element in the game the player has to interact with), and it is a reeeal b****!

- Timer and reset now work efficiently. Initially, I wanted to have everything fade to grey as the timer advanced, but it turned out I didn't quite have the shader I needed to do that, so I ended up making the scene fade to black to give an impression of 'darkness is eating the world away'. Not as 'glamorous' as the grayscale effect would've been, but good enough. Also saves me yet again more UI!

- Fixed how the car acceleration worked (suspending acceleration when falling or while mid-air). Still needs some work, but overall, it prevents making unrealistic moves (flying?)

- Implemented a cheap method of making the car jump over chasms. On day 2, I had wished I had gone for 3D physics instead of 2D, and it's been an uphill battle ever since. Post-mortem will probably list this as my main point of concern with development of this game: I'm simulating cheap 3D physics when I could've taken them directly from Unity...

- Save / Checkpoints now work! Whenever hit, these lights restore the 'light' (read: countdown) and become the new respawn area. I've placed one in the 'tutorial' area (right at the end) and one at the end of a tougher sequence, right before the boss.


On the other hand, I've got a lot of concerns:

- It has become clear I won't be getting much more done before the end of the competition. I'm still short on sounds (and have no music), I still have a lot of issues to resolve/fix, and a lot of the mechanics require polish.

- I'm getting a feeling my game will have limited depth, and very little actual breadth. I think it won't take more than a few minutes to beat, which is very discouraging given the amount of time I've sunk into each individual component. I wish I had a better feel of when to stop devving and switching gears to actual level design. I feel like the game currently looks like a developer's test level.

- My initial concept was simply too much. I can't build the progression I had in mind to support the game from a narrative standpoint. It would require too much asset production, and I can't afford to spend much more time producing assets for the game: I need to focus on things I do better.

- I really wanted to introduce a kickass feature (my first boss!) but I've hit a few roadblocks that have made it less interesting and more time consuming. I had imagined there would be an easy way to use a particle emitter to emit particles that had actual collision, but it seems this only works well in 3D (one more reason why I should've used 3D collisions and not 2D!)


All in all, the game is taking shape, and I'm confident I'll have a full game loop and actual conclusion by the time of delivery, but I'll be leaving a lot unfinished, and some of the potential will remain latent in the final build... I'm pretty sure other contestants are hitting this reality-check on day 4 as well, so I'm not worried, just disappointed.