Step #5: Long-distance race
It is fairly easy to start a project, but hard to continue working on it day after day. Our interest goes away from us little by little: because some things are boring to do, because quite often we try everything to create what we have in mind but the result is not what we thought it would be, and main of the time we have tons of ideas popping in our head giving us the impression of having “amazing new ideas”… Yes, what we have in mind is always more cool than what we finally are able to achieve. Whatever the project we have worked on, are working on and will work on. Ever.
But what my experience told me is that even if we can’t precisely create what we wanted, at least we can come close to it and event add elements we didn’t thought before. And that’s the coolest part imo: working on the feelings and the sensations, testing them, reworking them, testing and discovering new things and finally having something we can be proud of.
It has been two years since I started the project and I still have a long road ahead to complete it. During this time we moved to another flat, I changed my job (still time consuming), I postponed the project way too much… But I came back working on it. I changed the scope (because I know I would not be able to finish it this way) and, bit by bit, the project is taking form.
Now we have a worldmap with a fog of war + a random generation of the map after each new game:
The items, NPC, weather and lands ingame depend on the tiles we select on:
We have the NPC system with the dialogs:
The dialogs and events are simple but can easily be set via the inspector in Unity:
We also have a system of skills and items we can gain during our run. The skills can be use againevery X day (one map/tile completed = one day) and the items can be used until we deplete their charges.
The missing parts are the save system and some other features, but we are quite close to complete the MUST HAVE features of the game. Now our next step (and mandatory one) is: planification!
As we mainly completed the preproduction step, now we need to think about the production one. We took quite some time with my daughter to write in a rough backlog in order to know better: what we aim, what is the remaining amount of work and where are our priorities (which will help us later remove/postpone features).
So what I need to do now: drawing, coding, testing. Doing it again. And again. And again.
And for the fun here is one of the last characters I am working on:
(I love it, so cute!)
Thanks for reading! And see you in 10 years :’)