Dev Log Pt. 3 - UX/Game Feel

In no way am I an expert on these things!

It's funny, I feel like I have a solid idea of what things feel good to me in a game vs what feels clunky, but when I'm working on a project entirely on my own without being able to bounce it off anyone, that task gets a lot harder.

My main problem to solve was the feel of shelving books and making sure all information the player needed was front & center and very clear. I implemented two solutions I'd brainstormed last time:

• The player can zoom in on a particular bookshelf and move up and down along the shelves to get a closer look at them.
• When a book is held, its information is shown in a big canvas overlay at the top of the screen. While positioning it, the books to its left and right also have their information blown up as well.

This has ended up feeling pretty good, and I’m happy with the two methods of positioning a book I’ve coded during this last development cycle:

1. Click to position a book, and it will be placed immediately to the left of the book clicked on, or
2. Using the Q and E keys to shift the book’s positioning left or right by one spot.

I’ve also implemented a quick sort to get all the books in order. One funny downside of this is that the books all appear together in big chunks, with similar backs, and it does not have a very realistic feel to it. Sort of just looks like the library consists of 20 different full sets of encyclopedia that the player is sorting.

There’s a satisfying element to that maybe, but the look isn’t quite there. Part of the original design is I wanted the books themselves to have realistic dewey numbers, but that means the books only have the last couple digits of the number randomized, which results in the pattern seen above. There’s a couple ways I could solve this,

1. Just let go of the dewey accuracy and fully randomize the numbers, or
2. Include way more book prefabs/possibilities. Maybe further to that, create a few duplicates of the same book prefab with multiple places it could be sorted (a book called “financial downfall” might actually be an economics book, or a fiction book, or a biography, etc.)

There probably won’t be a ton of players that super care about the accuracy of the decimal system, the main appeal I’m going for is the satisfaction of sorting everything in order. To that end I have a day-end scoring system that builds a multiplier based on how many books you shelve, with an accuracy percentage that contributes as well. It also subtracts an entire point from the multiplier for every book shelved incorrectly to dissuade throwing books on in any order.

Currently I’ve got the library putting itself back in order overnight with a quick sort, but that might make more sense as a game mechanic (once the library gets too disheveled from mistakes, hit a button on the PC to sort everything back, for a time penalty or something).

One big element missing is definitely a bit more sound - currently there’s just ambient sound to go with the weather/time of day, but I need a few satisfying clunks and a bit of ambient music to go under the game. I am toying with the idea of having the actual gameplay loop not include any music, since it’s meant to be a high score attack sort of game there’s a lot of time spent in this one loop, so it’s a bit of an ultimate test as far as game music is concerned. A lot of other games in the sim genre don’t bother with much of this, so I may not either, but I’ll see if anything feels like it fits.

That’ll segue naturally into a post on polish and optimization, which I’ll probably talk about next time. Until then!