Wow, so this devlog is a few weeks late. I actually finished my Week 13 game on the 28th of November and now it’s the 21st of December. I’ve also already released Week 14 and Week 15. Better late than never? I’m going to keep this short.

The theme for this week is “Earth”, and so I planned on making a game where you need to build an underground mine network to extract rare minerals. I really wanted to try out something interesting around AI, such as swarm mechanics. In a classic move, this turned out to be too large of a scope.

I ended up making a very barebones prototype where you can move your character around with the right mouse button and queue up “dig” tasks with the left mouse button. There is some interesting pathfinding going on in the background, where the miners will try to dig around certain blocks if they’re too hard. Unfortunately the build is buggy and it’s common for miners to get stuck in a mining action. Oops.

While this “game” turned out to be a pretty dreadful experience, I do think I like the idea behind having a group of worker units walking around with your character’s avatar. I think the fog of war adds a certain level of mystery, and I wonder if I could create a much more polished system like this for a horror game. I love the idea of making a game about escaping a research lab with your small squad, and having to order them to maybe hack certain systems or use machinery to unlock new areas and abilities. But if you have a group to small in certain areas, they can get picked off by the monsters. So there’s a balance between keeping your own self safe and the rest of your crew. If I ever make this game, at least I got the idea from making this prototype.

What went well

• Gained more experience with the Unity Tilemap
• Got an idea for a future game prototype

What could have gone better

• The game is extremely simple and barely counts as a “game”
• No graphics, audio or juice. Everything is just blocks.

What I learned

• Complexity != Fun, I should focus on tighter gameplay loops first rather than the larger progression loops.
• More complex strategy games would need multiple people working on a prototype, or I need to build up my skills to get to that point.

Summary

While this project turned out terrible, at least I finished and learned from my mistakes. Either way, this was still worth my time.

As always, if you want to try out the prototype, 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!