Full Crunch Ahead!

I know I have been vocal about being anti-crunch culture. My deadlines are less forgiving than my principles. 

A lot has changed since the initial build! A year ago, me and my partner Ariel decided to make a game. This rapidly expanded into being his bachelor thesis project. In 2022, we exhibited a first, bare bones prototype of the game. You could walk around the apartment and look at dialogue. No story progression, not even a title card. But people loved it. 

From there, we continued to expand the scope. We already knew what we wanted to say - but now how we wanted to say it. It should play over the course of Channukah - great, let's do an 8 day game cycle! It should all play indoors - great, which locations do we need? It should be a point and click style game - great, how about some mini games?

Well, then life happened and we worked on the project on and off since its conception. I wrote a 20k word script, Ariel rendered out the stars of the show, some absolutely gorgeous background art. And now we have a week before our deadline and there is so much left to do... This game will take about 45-60 min to play for people from start to end. Why do I keep doing this to myself. 

What is done

We had the script copy-edited. The environments are all done. The game has full game progression, dialogue trees and two distinct possible endings with four main paths you can take. There is a bare-bones inventory system in place. There is a saving system implemented but it is missing some core features. 

Plus, the game is actually playable from start to finish now.

What needs to be done

Implement the copy-edited script version. 

Finish, rig and animate the new 3D models. Implement the new animations into the game. 

Implement a third ending. 

Polish up and finish implementing the inventory system. 

Create a chapter-select mode and adjust the saving system to be usable with it. 

Add flavor text in every one of the almost 100 unique room states.

Audio (though that will not be done for the exhibition next week, as there will not be an audio installation).

UI edits (cuz let's face it, she's basic)

Setting adjustments for the exhibition, so the game can be just as fun to play at home as it is to play in an exhibition.

Fix. So. Many. Bugs. No, Levi is not supposed to be on top of the sink.

Maybe make a web-GL version of this mess.

Decisions I regret 

I will curse myself and my ego for the rest of time that I absolutely just HAD to write all my own systems. I wrote a dialogue handler and point-and-click system from scratch instead of, you know, getting one of the dozen tools available on the Unity Asset Store. So now all the bugs are mine and mine only.

I thought I was so smart to create everything using nested Prefabs! But it means I am working blind half the time and the other half of the time some scaling or rotation issue will invariably crop up and then my characters are the size of a thimble or so big, the progression colliders are off screen! Why is Unity like this? Why am I like this?

What I am glad I did

On the other hand, I am very glad that I took months of time writing, rewriting and re-rewriting our dialogue manager. It is rather modular and even in the stress of crunch, I have been very easily able to work into and expand it to our needs. Same is true for the Event system I wrote. While it is not the most impressive or powerful code, it does its job okay-ish and it is what powers our entire game, so, I love it. 

While making the levels is a pain because Unity, deciding early on an orthographic cam with pre-rendered backgrounds with real time lit characters and invisible colliders was a life savior. We can focus on the fun stuff (aka, you know, THE GAME) without having to juggle resource management, lightmap baking, texture size limits, 3D display bugs... Aesthetically, the orthographic cam hearkens back to Ariel's dollhouse art, one of his main techniques. This gives us a reasonable excuse to make a resource-friendlier game. 

And my biggest happy factor? That I am making this game with Ariel.