*WARNING* You probably want to turn your speakers down first.
Idea
I started this week thinking that my week 19 game would be the result of a game jam that I’d be participating in at the end of the week.
Obviously, that didn’t go so well.
I hadn’t really been thinking about a game idea as I wanted to save all of my creative juices for the jam (in addition, I didn’t want to come into the jam with a pre-conceived notion of what I’d like to make). Then, by the time the whole debacle was over, I was fairly emotionally and creatively drained and needed a few days to recuperate.
I was afraid that I would have a failure for the second time in row due to this whole situation.
Luckily, after we escaped from the set – I was able to stay at the house of Rich Lemarchand (big big thank you to Rich for taking a bunch of us in for a few days) where my creative juices were very swiftly returned. One of the many many books in Rich’s house (which, according to him, is only a fraction of the books he actually owns) was a book by the name of Poemotion 1. It’s an interactive book that creates tiny animations when you slide a semi-transparent insert over each page. It’s a fascinating book that I slowly became obsessed with over the next few days (seriously, I almost tried to sneak it out). It got me thinking about movement and shapes, which led to me thinking about sine waves.
Ultimately it inspired me to try creating a game based on using sine waves to make things move.
What went right
The fact that I was able to create anything in the days after the whole GAME_JAM debacle was pretty amazing. I was so drained and frustrated over the whole thing that I couldn’t even think about games. I tried to channel my ill feelings into a creative endeavor, but it just felt so wrong to put those feelings into a project.
I took a lot of inspiration from the environment around me after the jam, and I think that helped me a lot. I took in the visuals and the creativity that surrounded me by staying at Rich’s as well as working out of Glitch City and channeled THAT into a new project.
What went wrong
I didn’t have a lot of time to work on this as I had assumed that I would have a different means of achieving a game this week. This means that when I ran into issues such as how the collision detection was working, I had to gloss over it and fudge a lot of interactions between objects. It resulted in a pretty bad feeling and difficult game.
I wasn’t able to use the bad things that happened throughout the week as inspiration as I had hoped I would be able to. I had so much emotion about this thing that happened to me and I hoped that I would be able to channel that into something creative. I was disappointed that all I could manage to do was be angry.
What I learned
Sometimes things don’t go quite according to plan – it’s always good to have a few contingency plans. Also, collision detection in Unity doesn’t work quite the way I thought it did.
Oh also, don’t sign a contract you’re not 100% comfortable with and it’s okay to walk away from a shitty situation. Also, the indie community is amazing and full of love <3
Hi there,
I played your game and liked the idea.
I think you may try adding more options for the controls?, maybe to use wasd and arrows to control the bars, because this will let you change both at the same time, with mouse input you cant, if you move the arrow too low or too up, it gets out of the scroll control, so you loose control.
It seams as you are fighting “against the tide”, did you try putting the “collector” in the middle and the possibility to change the tide’s direction?, like if it were a pong but using tides instead of a paddle.
Im also developing in Unity, was wondering, are you using sin, cos functions on cubes colliders array?.
Thank you for sharing your experience,