Game implementing Physics and a cosmetic shop


This document is mainly for my benefit, but some people may find the information interesting or useful. I'm just typing things as they come, so this is in the moment for where I am at in my game dev journey. Still early days, but I'm learning a lot each time.

Wellbeing check in

I've just released little doggo BIG adventure!

I'm really happy with how it turned out, this was my first time properly implementing physics into a game instead of hard coding everything as transform.positions, honestly feels great because it's something that I've not been able to get my head around for a long time.

Incidentally I also decided to add cosmetics, which I really wasn't prepared for how quickly that would balloon work wise just immediately. It was just really confusing how I was going to implement it to begin with, cue me standing in the doorway to the kitchen, hands on head just staring through the window for like 20 minutes. I must have freaked out my housemate who was working in the other room.

But it works, so many little moving parts, text not being displayed at the correct time, making sure each of the states are correct, honestly a nightmare, and the idea of implementing anything more complicated right now is something that is going to need a bit more practice.

This project has really highlighted some key areas that I just have no idea where to start right now, namely animations, sound dev and getting things to look more professional. At least my art is good enough to get the point across, but man, I can feel the long road ahead.

Today was tough, I woke up dealing with things happening in life, and I spent the whole day not interacting with another person, that's super isolating, which is probably the toughest part of developing games. Not being able to bounce ideas off someone, just implementing things into the void, all the while being aware of how much there is still to learn. Proper existential crisis, so I went for a walk to some place called Pegasus court, not that exciting when I got there so I turned back.

I'm really curious about how I can make a game in the more general sense, these still feel like small mobile projects, but how do I make a proper well rounded experience you know? I'll just keep going and maybe it'll click one day.

Thanks for reading. 

Technical stuff

This project is cool, whilst it is really simplistic there's a tonne of moving parts under the hood that I'm proud of understanding. I'm hoping to show it off as a portfolio piece since there were so many different random issues that came up.

Just so I don't forget the key learnings from this project:

You can't apply forces to objects being moved along by the transform (it keeps resetting it back).

Parent objects will start inheriting colliders from their child objects.

OnBecameInvisible(), watch this one if you're using it to hide things, coins weren't spawning in correctly because of how it was being used

Compression format was causing some issues when making builds

Fixed update, use this for physics and update for input (else you lose inputs)

Different height for jumps, use a timer to test how long the button was pressed down for

Greybox prototyping isn't as bad as it seemed, perfect for testing inputs and general implementation.

Until next time, good luck!

Leave a comment

Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.