Chapter 6

There we are, tomorrow is the final day, therefore day 6 was critical: whatever I did not complete today simply won't be in the final game.

So what DID I get in?

- Sounds: That was my primary focus. The game had a single sound (was arguably, more than one, but they were all part of a 'system'). Now, I've added sounds to most gameplay ingredients (some fitting, some not). Two notable elements are still lacking sounds, so I *might* be able to squeeze that in tomorrow if everything else is up to specs.

- Music: There's one, but it will only be revealed to those with enough courage to complete the game. Good Luck with that!

- Visual assets V2: My artistic talents are lacking, but I still managed to fix a few assets that didn't work. For example, I had an 'oil patch' that was scaled up so much that it felt pixelated. I went back and made the asset from scratch to accommodate larger resolutions. It still looks weird, but it is a definite improvement on the previous one.

- For a while, I only had 2 'notes' to explain the entire story. I've added a few more to help the player figure out the story (and how the game actually links with the theme, which may appear a bit subtle until you actually read the notes).

- The Boss now works appropriately. (YAY!)


So what DID I fail to implement?

- On day 2 I had an awesome idea, but sadly, as days passed by, it became clear that feature would take too much time compared to other interesting features. At that point, I had 3 choices:
* 1 * Opt for this kickass feature, and nothing else (which would've made a rather empty game)
* 2 * Make my peace and forego that feature (which is what I did)
* 3 * Refactor the game into a 3D game (which I'll speak more about in my post-mortem for this project)

The idea was simple: objects that 'fall off' surfaces become surfaces. Simple eh? I had a number of ideas on how the player would end up pushing obstacles (erasers, etc.) to make a path, and possibly include a means for the clever player to bypass most of the game that way.
Of course, with 3D objects, that would've been easy, but given I started in 2D, and refused to refactor on day 2, I had to sulk it up.

- Proper menus / credits roll, etc: I chose to focus on gameplay alone, therefore the game kicks right into the action and finishes in the same way. In that regard, it would be ideally played as a web-browser game, but given I've tested it out mostly as an exec, I'd be hesitant to change this now...


A couple of things I will tackle tomorrow

- Level Design cleanup: A lot of my ingredients have collisions boxes that fit perfectly fine, but this also means that my car can't virtually hold on any surface so long as it has barely a wheel touching. I could try to refactor this, but at this stage, it would be more efficient to look at each prefab individually and compensate on their collision boxes.

- Test / Troubleshoot: I've mostly tested from my dev environment this far. Luckily, I also have another station (desktop) and a laptop I'll be able to test against. That should allow me to cover Win7, Win8 and WinXP configurations. Since the laptop belongs to my GF primarily, I don't suspect it contains any development runtimes, etc. So it should be a good environment to test against pre-requisites, whereas my XP machine is old and should give me low-specs results.


All in all, I don't expect for day 7 to be a productive day: I'm tired, and social obligations are kicking in. I'm happy I have managed to get something playable early on as it allowed me to quickly switch gears when needed and focus on the end-result. I find myself in a comfortable position where I can ship anytime at the end of day 6, and can really focus my attention on actual polish / QAing.

Once again, no video today. I'll post a full walkthrough after day 7, along with my post-mortem though.
(still, a screenshot in attachment!)