https://aki-bread.itch.io/crown-of-persuasion Once again, deadlines have proven to be the most effective method for forcing me into action and completion lol.
Made a 2D platformer/visual novel game in Unity for a game jam, with a team of 3!
The theme was very interesting: “you are the weapon.”
Game dev is hard… managing game state takes a lot of thinking and design choices, even for a small game like this. Something to look into for future game dev: State machines
We were overly ambitious with pursuing a game with multiple endings, didn’t end up being able to make user choices significantly impact the ending. But we still made a decently polished and playable game with an interesting premise!
learnings
- Platformer mechanics
- General techniques
- Scene manager for controlling scenes
- I implemented a dialogue system from scratch!
- Not scalable at all LOL but it was sufficient for our purposes
- Allowed us to write dialogue scripts in text files and parse them, and even diverge in dialogue based on player choices during conversation
- parse speaker vs. dialogue by splitting on colons, quotations
- very basic file and syntax parsing where … TODO
- navigate to specific files by literally having the file name in the ‘dialogue script’ txt file
- or based on the number input from the user, navigate to the next index in the character’s specific array of dialogue text files
- very basic file and syntax parsing where … TODO
- parse speaker vs. dialogue by splitting on colons, quotations
- In the future, look into node managers or Inky … dialogue is tricky
- we tracked game state based on which text file index certain characters were on - pretty brittle/finicky