The Sims: Dino
A downloadable game
CONCEPT:
Manage the survival and relationship of dinosaurs!
WHAT WENT WRONG:
Using scalable and self-inferring systems is hard and bug prone. Even though I took some time to planned out how I will build out the system, it can be prone to bug if I plan to expand on my previous ideas. The most obvious problem came when I try to expand the ability for a Sim to use an object to its ability to use another Sim (to communicate and socialize). This feature introduced many bugs since the "using" system is only meant to be called from the user to the used, but since both sims are users/used, of which have its own stats to increase, it introduced alot of problems.
WHAT WENT RIGHT:
Of many of the code I wrote, there's only been one time when I ran into bugs when I was implementing event-driven system. I believe this system can be helpful since it allows a class to not overreach into another class, and I plan to implement it to many of my monobehaviors from now on.
WHAT I LEARNED:
This week is successful, not only did I implemented my initial goal of having some sort of needs stats in my game, I also am able to implement other features such as personality and relationships. My plan was to implement as much of the sims as I can in under a week, and I was able to do that. Although the code was very messy (which I had planned), I was able to get my feet wet in sims/ agents systems, which I suspect will be really useful if I ever want to release a large a large scale game.
WHAT I PLAN TO LEARN NEXT WEEK:
For the next week, I plan to prototype ideas for my first game which I plan to publish. It will be a mobile rts system and I am debating whether I should try to implement many ideas in that week as a prototype or focus on the game's code architecture.
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Comments
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It’s impressive that you adapted the sims core logic in such a period of time. That’s something will serve as a backbone to a lot of projects
Consider improving the flow of the user experience. There aren’t a ton of visual feedback for player actions and it’s hard to tell if clicking around is actually doing anything. Creating a help menu to explain the controls is a bare minimum and a cop out, but it’s better than nothing. If done correctly, a game’s UX will allow the player to teach themselves about the game, which is the best way to get people to continue pressing buttons.
If you choose to revisit this concept, expand on the user interface to make it more reactive.
Good work! This is a huge breakthrough
This game is really fun. Seeing the dinosaurs roaming around and interacting was very cool. The different tabs with the relationships, needs and status was really great. I think the dinosaur movement is very smooth. The day/night cycle is cool. I wasn't really sure what I was doing at the beginning. Knowing now that I have to right click to move the dinosaurs the experience is much better. the wooded area for the bathroom is genius. I can wait to try to max out the relationships the next time I play. Good work.