DevLog #6: Midterm Progress

Response to J. Kyle Pittman's 10 things I learned in one year of keeping a devlog:

https://gunmetalarcadia.com/wordpress/10-things-i-learned-in-one-year-of-keeping-a-devlog/

The thrill of publishing, and the reward-feedback loop that is very different from a much more comparatively low-effort writing verses making and publishing a game. The act of writing and updating something within a shorter time frame evokes a definitively varied feeling of gratification than trying to finish a prototype or a game within a week. Something I would like to resonate with are animated gifs of the games that I am making to record its progress. The extent of how vulnerable and scary that sounds to me is quite surprising, though a develog supposedly serves a similar purpose. This may also be because I am much more visually oriented, and publishing a prototype that is lacking in its visual aspect is a such a daring move in my perspective. Contrarily, retrospective progress reports seem much safer to me, as I’ve already iterated and logically rearranged and moved on from that part of the process.

Midterm Progress Entry:

So far, I’ve play tested a couple times with the current mechanics and I have yet to hash out one key aspect of my game, which is a high score system (iterating from a countdown). Visually I’ve gotten to a certain satisfactory stage as all of my play testers were able to correctly guess that it took place in a subway, but I can further iterate and solidify a UI system that informs the player about when the train is departing and when the next station is arriving. This would require me to keep the countdown that opens and closes the doors, and giving the player another clearer visual bar for the station movement.

I swapped some of the 3D objects last week, added more objects, and changed the other passenger layouts that are on the platforms. The player movements are the same, and I started on a script that moves the platform if the player misses the train.

One of my concern is adding the UI and honing down on creating the illusion that the train is moving. I feel generally okay about my progress so far, though I still feel like there’s always something to keep working on!