This week I returned to the familiar development environment of Unity, and so I wanted to do something a bit more ambitious with my game. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to spend as much time on the game as I would have liked over the week, and I ended up once again working on the weekend.

I didn’t quite know what I wanted to make this week, so I really just began to wing it, making whatever I thought would be cool at the time. I started by installing Shapes, which is an excellent vector-based drawing asset by Freya Holmér. I played around with it a bit, and ended up making a dog character. I really can’t overstate how great it is to be able to just make simple graphics inside of Unity instead of a workflow where you create something in an external program and import it. Obviously it wouldn’t work for larger games, but for my purposes it was perfect!

I then had to setup player input. I wanted to try adding controller support, but doing that using the normal Unity input system is a little bit inflexible. This seemed like a great opportunity to learn how to use Rewired for the first time, as I’m aware it’s used in a lot of larger Unity projects. Setup was quite simple, and I was then able to move the dog character around the screen using both keyboard and controller!

After adding the basic movement and animating the character, I realised that I needed some way for the doggo to interact with the environment. As everyone knows, dogs love to bark. I hooked up the A button and Spacebar to a bark action, added a bark sound effect, and then for extra juice, added some text that appears each time the dog barks.

I also added in some rocks and grass to the level, footsteps on the doggo, and then realised that we need something to bark at. I did a quick search for dog occupations, and came across herding dogs! It made sense that this was going to be a sheep herding game. However, I’m not a great artist, so the sheep ended up looking like rabbits. So they’re sheeprabbits, or rabbitsheep. This is canon now.

At this point I was happy to have some interactivity in the game. I was thinking how cool it would be to make something kind of like Untitled Goose Game, where you can go around and bark at different people and animals, and see their different reactions. Then I remembered it was Saturday night and I need to finish the game tomorrow.

On Sunday I was really not in the mood to work on this. While I was happy with what I had made so far, there wasn’t really a game. So I made some wooden fences, set up a pen, and got to work on some glue code to get some semblance of a game structure together. Originally I was planning on making a few levels for this, but to be honest, the game just wasn’t fun once I had the first level working. I spent so much time on animating the characters and making them feel like they have a personality, but the gameplay just wasn’t there. On top of that, I couldn’t get the WebGL build to work. The game would freeze every few seconds, and there were strange visual glitches. I didn’t have the energy to fix this. So I called it a night, finished up the game and published it. It takes a minute to beat.

https://imgur.com/a/HciQcH7

What went well

• I was able to add personality and detail to the dog and sheeprabbit characters
• I think movement felt good, and the game looked nice visually
• I was able to “wing it” and make a game without planning much at the start

What could have gone better

• I worked weekends again 😬
• I underestimated how much time it would take to make the characters
• I didn’t use my time as efficiently as possible. I had fun characters, but no game
• The gameplay is a bit janky and uninteresting
• The characters get stuck on walls a lot
• The WebGL build didn’t work, so almost nobody is going to bother downloading this game
• The playtime is about a minute or two, and isn’t very enjoyable

What I learned

• I learned how to setup Rewired for keyboard and controller input
• I learned how to use Shapes for making assets quickly in-engine
• I learned how important it is to have the game structure working first, before adding in animations or extra details.
• I learned to start trusting Unity’s physics system more for movement instead of trying to roll my own

Summary

Overall, this game is one that I have mixed feelings on. On one hand, I felt like it had a lot of potential. I started off with a cool character, a cool 2.5D art style and some ideas floating around in my head for what this was going to be.

Due to time constraints, overscoping and a lack of a clear design, it really fell flat from what I wanted it to be. I think if I had another week I could have made something pretty good, but that goes against the spirit of trying to make one game a week. Maybe once I start doing one game a month I can revisit this game and give it the treatment it deserved.

As always, if you want to try out the game, the link is right here:

If you wanna play around with the code, I also have a link to the GitHub repo if you click here!