Devlog Blog Post #1

Brainstorming:

The theme for this project was Alchemy. I had a difficult time finding something to do that wasn't a basic crafting simulator and the only thing I kept thinking of was Full Metal Alchemist in that one element beats another. I took this idea and found another game, Rock Paper Scissors, that had simple and familiar mechanics. I wanted to focus on my ability to polish UI elements and work with simulated cards and the general user experience.

Development:

Rock Paper Scissors seems like a game ran by a series of state machines, so I started with that. I build a general gameplay controller for the different game states and learned that the right feeling in the game state machine took a waiting state. This was a big learning experience for me as my past state machines haven't used a waiting state. I used a few coroutines during the delay to perform different features and then I started working on the UI. I got a friend of mine to build some cartoon element icons and built some UI to represent the different actions the player can take. The chosen elements were Fire, Water and Earth. I worked out which element represents which condition and moved on to the testing.

Testing:

Testing this project was fairly easy. I just had to make sure that the enemy could choose fire, water and earth. I also needed to be sure the player could choose and that each condition properly beat their respective counter.

Polish:

This project was going to be focused on the polish from the beginning, so I got straight into it. I added started by animating the cards the player could select and focused on building some form of progression to the game via a campaign system. Once I finished that I worked on creating a character and got a friend to start working on background art. I added in an indication of what each character selected on their turn. I also added some animations for the character to show that they are casting their elemental spells. I also wanted a greater indication of who won, so I moved the characters to the middle to show which one won that bout. I also added UI for a health indication and created a boss enemy that has slightly more health to indicate the ending of the game.