Semester 1 - The Prototypes, and a pair of wax wings

Semester 1 was spent doing a lot of learning, and making many mistakes.

Starting with the game jams at the beginning, I made two prototypes where I would investigate different mechanics and visual ideas for my game. At this time, I was tossing between 3D and 2D, with 2.5D also being considered.

The first game jam prompt was "It spreads!", inspired by the Pirate Software game jams in the past. I wanted to try my hand at coding a game AI to respond to different objects with various behaviours. Namely, these behaviours were attracted and repelled; I picked these for their relevance to fishing and fishing game-type mechanics. I kept it simple as I only wanted to focus on the programming and behaviours. What I found was the most difficult was their physics, which in hindsight spelled out what was to come.

Next was our second game jam, which was inspired by a conference talk that our lecturer had just visited. Our prompt was UI and UX design, which was quite useful for my project as I planned to have a lot of windows and menus at the time. I decided to have a play around using terrain tools in 3D, and moving a character into a collider to prompt a window. This is more literal prototyping, as I was seeing how I could get a player to approach a river to start fishing where the minigame will appear in the window. I set it up as a separate camera as I planned to set up the minigame under the map and just stream it to that camera. I had some interesting quirks with floaty physics where I just needed a ground check, but ultimately ignored it as it wasn't my main goal. What I struggled with the most was getting the minigame (which was just a ball falling) to reset when the player stopped fishing. I just could not get the destroy command working right, and would end up with multiple balls within the scene. Eventually I got this to work, but I felt I hadn't really explored what I could achieve through this or UI in general.

Biting off more than I could chew.

I started with high hopes and grand ideas, which should've been the first red flag. At this time, I felt I was already behind compared to my classmates ( who moved onto their capstone instead of getting stuck on the second game jam). My question for my exegesis was alright, I was happy with it at the time, and the idea felt reachable within the year to me. I really wanted to make this game right, so I hastily got to work.

However, the wings were made of beeswax. And like Icarus I too thought of myself greater than the sun.

A slow and painful decline.

It didn't take long for me to lag behind. However, I had many issues in my personal life that contributed to this - particularly an undiagnosed health issue that led me to forgetting information within my short term memory and losing concentration. There were times I felt I was learning to program all over again. Despite this, all progress made was only made within class time - barely even six hours a week spent on creating this game! This wasn't sustainable, and it was quickly made apparent when I noticed how much further along my classmates were. The wings had started melting.

I got myself so focused on level design initially - I had quite the big map. I made my map, then remade it again when I felt that the terrain wasn't as good as I wanted. I feel like I did this just to avoid programming (which is a terrible idea, by the way) due to my lack of concentration at the time. I started with basic code: date, time, just simple numbers to warm me up and procrastinate on the bigger stuff. I pushed onto learning how to use Unity's nav-mesh, which I found extremely interesting (and much easier than brute forcing like how I was previously). I also played around with test animations, and relearnt how to navigate Unity's animator. 

The project was slowly starting to turn into a chore. What passion and vigour I had was quickly shut down by any problems I had. Having my code fall to pieces before me, and having no understanding or recollection of why or how to fix it was soul crushing and demotivating. I understand now how much pressure I had put on myself to make something perfect. I spent most of University gutting myself over bugs I had no time or fix, or visuals I had no time to create. I do have a habit of not giving myself enough time to finish projects, and always find myself rushing to the end only to have to leave these bugs in my game. For me, the capstone project was a way for me to prove to myself that I do have what it takes to make something that works. But as the semester came to a close, I quickly came to realise that my wax wings have melted and I was plummeting into the sea.

And like Icarus, I fell.

Right at the worst possible time, the worst possible thing had happened. I go to open my project onto my home computer and I quickly realised that something was missing as error messages popped up in my console. One of my scripts was gone; It was my NPC script. This script held the brain that controlled the nav-mesh AI. The NPC now sat in my game unmoving as I scrambled to find it on my USB. I wonder even as I write this what happened, but my popular theory is that I never took it off the computers at AUT. That, or it was lost when transferring files. 

I was already out of time at that point. I was a day late to submit, and I would need to leave for work in fifteen minutes. So, I did what I could. I just had to hand in what I had and hope to get a passing grade. The cherry on top was having to explain in a video how it didn't work. Not only that, but I just couldn't build out my game for whatever reason. I was in no rush to find out, and just handed in my assets with instructions on how to open this in Unity (with an "I'm sorry" note to explain the situation). I didn't end up going into work that day, I was inconsolable. I felt like I had failed.

An idea reborn.

I loathed the idea of returning to the project. I even wondered if I should just quit and try something else, because I just couldn't get anything to go right. But, I was still determined to get this degree especially after all the time and money that went into this. I had the whole break to think it over, so that is what I did (as well as being in hospital and finding a new house, I really had no free time in the break).

Returning to University for the second semester, I realised that in order to finish my capstone and finish something I can be happy with I needed a fresh restart and a different perspective.