Originally, I had a bunch of ideas that were scrapped because of time constraints or lack of technical skill and knowledge on my part. One idea was to have a bunch of different mini scenarios swap through in random order like: a chess game on a board almost finished except for the winning move, and the player would need to determine the right move and drag the piece to that spot. Then the next scenario would show up like a pitcher constantly pouring juice into a glass ⅚ of the way full and you would need to hit the spacebar at the point that the juice is at the very top edge of the glass but before it overflows. There would be a timer in the corner of maybe 5 seconds for each scenario. Every idea I had ended up making the “speed” part dependent on the speed of the players’ reflexes, instead of speed of something in the game.

Jackson very kindly offered to help me out this week, since I knew I had to start with something simple but it would still take me a while to figure out the code and would inevitably have to cut a lot because of technical issues. With his tutoring, I successfully created sphere movement from scratch, as well as pickup items. Pickups were a mechanic that I had never attempted before, since it seemed intimidating and I assumed that I would run into too many issues to implement it well. Since I never tried it on my own and was being pessimistic/closed minded about it, I never realized that it was actually relatively simple. It took him about 45 minutes to walk me through everything which felt so fast compared to trudging through it alone, and writing all the code seemed a lot less frustrating than it did on my own. I was stunned by the painlessness of creating the technical framework. So I owe a lot of this project’s success to Jackson! This was, all in all, great practice. I learned a new mechanic, and it made me reevaluate my attitude towards my growth as a game designer.

Challenges I ran into: I didn’t have a win screen, because the trigger I had set didn’t work. Turns out I was too tired last night to realize that I had written OnCollisionEnter instead of OnTriggerEnter. I wanted to include an easy level and a hard level, but ran out of time to make a hard level. Also, I wanted to add sound effects for when you get a pickup, but couldn’t get that to work either. Most of the problems came from extra effects, so I’m not too hung up about them. I want to figure them out now that I’m less tired though, because most likely I made a small mistake somewhere I didn’t catch. I wanted the golf player dudes to be the pickup, and created this story in my head where the game was instead called “Golf Ball’s Revenge” where you, the golf ball, was tired of being hit by their golf clubs all the time and ran over them instead as pickups. They would be destroyed, and you would gain speed for the same ramp and platform goal. However, when I tried to replace the pickup cube with the guy’s model prefab, the pickup script wouldn’t work. I instead just scattered a bunch of them around the map for the vibes.

I am proud of the environment I made to add visual pizzazz to the game, and the title screen I drew. Even though it’s simple and more than the fact that I made it at all, I’m most proud of the fact that I actually understand and have a grasp on all the code behind what is making the game function. It feels like I gained a lot of clarity through making this project.