P3: Spaceboi vs. The World Reflection

Going into P3, I knew I wanted to help make a digital game so I was grateful when both Nick and Alejandro agreed to let me join their team. Initially I was a little confused on what made a Systems game a Systems game, I thought it was just an expanded “actions have consequences” type of deal and while it does involve that, I came to realize that a big part of Systems games are the interactions between different game mechanics and how they can affect one another. 

When I had joined the team, the idea to teach about environmental conservation had been set and the basic mechanic that extracting too much of one resource would lead to some consequence was already in the air. The night that I had joined, we met up as a team and had a nice brainstorming session where Alejandro told us about how he had this story idea for a character named Spaceboi and we went from there. We decided what our main resources would be, the consequences of extracting too much of any of the resources, and the idea that the basic tools you would start with could eventually be upgraded to some power tool, but most importantly we decided we would have to continue this game for P4.

So, with these ambitious goals in mind, we knew that P3 would serve as a strong foundation for P4 while still allowing us to show some core parts of our system. We managed to create two extractable resources, both the tree and rocks. If you chop down too many trees, the climate will become very windy impacting player movement, and if you mine too many rocks then earthquakes will occur for a while, shaking the camera for a few seconds. We have the basic layout set, but I do think we missed that fun factor for this project. We have already started discussing ways to make the core game loop more fun by adding more obstacles (…enemies?) so I’m confident that when Spaceboi returns for P4, he will be better than ever.

Overall this has been an amazing learning experience and I can’t be thankful enough for my teammate. Alejandro with his amazing modeling skills and Nick for his bottomless knowledge on Unity itself. While I’ve worked with Unity in the past and know my way around, I’ve been able to learn a lot of new ways to do things and just new things in general, like Shade Graph. For example, I had a blast watching and trying to help Nick through making the procedural generation maps with Shader Graph. It’s something I had never seen done personally before so I’m thankful most of all how much I’ve been able to learn from my teammates.

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