Dev Log Pt. 2 - Basic Mechanics

I’ve done some creative writing during my life and something I’ve found functional recently is approaching the coding I’ve been doing for my projects to how I approached writing. First draft, just get it out onto the page, make it work, polish later. Currently, I’m in that in-between stage, where things could maybe use a bit of refactoring still, but I’ve got most of the nuts and bolts working.

Currently, once a book is picked up, you can move a highlight around the library by clicking & with keyboard controls, to shift it between shelves and eventually set it into place with a button press. Since all shelves are derived from the same basic class, this managed to work the same on all the shelves in the library including all the carts (those also contain shelves).

One big problem that needs solving is the readability/clarity of where you’re putting which books. I tried a zoom-in effect on the shelf itself, but even seeing the whole shelf across your screen doesn’t effectively communicate the information on each book in the shelf and where you’ll want to put something. Considering a few solutions to this:

• A hover feature where the call number gets amplified/zoomed for any book you’re hovering over
• When placing a book, a Canvas UI that shows the information for your held book, and also for the books your current placement selection is in between
• A zooming camera that gets even tighter in on the current shelf you’re placing on, so you only see a few books at a time but very large on the screen

That’s a problem I’m hoping to solve next week, as well as some basic gameplay stuff (books can be picked up from the carts, the carts fill up a bit each day and scale a bit with how many days you’ve been playing, etc). Once that’s done, it’ll be in a place where it can be playtested and I can ask people whether this is actually fun, and most importantly, however fun it currently is, what we can do to make it more fun. I’ve got a pretty sizable pool of family and friends that are excited to playtest what I’ve been working on and I trust them to be fairly scrutinous - a number of them work in the industry and will have a good critical eye for gameplay/feel.

This is for a school project and the game is “Due” on the 14th, although we’ll have some time for refinement and polish after that date so I’m feeling pretty comfortable with the timeline - I should be done the essentials in a week, so 1.5 weeks is plenty! Even once the project is done and presented and handed in I’ll want to develop this out into more of a full game and go for a full release later this year, should it prove to be a fun enough concept.

Next time I’ll probably make some notes on UX and game feel I’ll want to share, so I’ll see you then!