12/16/2024 - Playing Catch Up

Sadly, we're still in the phase of development where nothing looks good to show off. However, having a project actually make it this far is a huge achievement for me, so I'm talking about it anyway.

The game, as mentioned in the introduction, is a single player cooking game where you are very small. That's the main theme, but to get that to work we have a lot of programming to do. As a non-exhaustive list, the player needs to be able to move, trip, roll, grab, and place items. Items need to be able to place only if there is space, or combine if two items are compatible. You need to be able to grab items from a “box” infinitely, then submit an item to a submit station which can then check the ever-increasing list of required orders to submit and remove the required item as needed, or fault you if you didn't submit on time or delivered an item that wasn't required. There also needs to be event markers in the level which allow me to cause something to happen mid-way through to make things more interesting, such as “rush hour” where the orders come in faster, or make it start to rain to ruin your day.

These kinds of projects have failed in the past because I never implemented these things before giving up and moving on. However, I am older and have more experience in programming. What caused the failure? No planning. So I took each statement, broke it up into a TODO list that a programmer like me could understand, put it in a spreadsheet, and started marking things off one by one. Here's what it looks like:

You see all that green? That's all completed. The orange means it's on hold until later. The game is mostly programmed, I can now focus on making levels, features, art, and everything else a game entails. Sadly, that means there's still so much left to do, but there's a clear path to take.

All that progress doesn't look great though, it was all placeholder assets or quick sketches I only made in a few minutes that still need to be resized and scaled if the whole “you are the size of a rat” thing actually goes through. Here's what it's like so far; it's zoomed in to make things easier to work with, but everything (especially the player) needs to be half the size it is now.

And with that, the next step is another spreadsheet with another to-do list, then a whole lot of drawing and designing. Sadly, most of my experience is in programming so we're in uncharted territory. Wish me luck.

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