Desertopia - BenBonk Game Jam #1

Desertopia is a game about making it through a desert maze within a time limit, and distractions of people who say things to mislead you. I completed this game in 72 hours (Friday, May 29th - Monday, June 1st 2020) for the BenBonk Game Jam #1. It has the theme "Trust No One".

Theme/Design Decisions:
After running through some ideas about what I could do with the theme, I decided to keep it pretty literal by pursuing the concept "Don't listen to what people are telling you.". I chose to create a maze game, set in the desert where people were misleading you on where to go, while creating a situation where the player was racing against the time to make it to the end of the maze. The desert setting fit this well because deserts are often inhospitable. 

I chose to make the game fairly easy. I wanted to make sure everyone was able to get through the game with several wrong directions so as to not cause too much frustration. I had planned on creating plants/pools of water/negative affects to increase/decrease the health timer with a much more strict timer, but those were features I was not able to get into the game within the time limit.

Focus Areas:
As a part of this jam, I wanted to focus on creating a dialog system since that's one area I haven't worked in much. It was accomplished fairly basically by creating a panel that activates with text that is determined by who/what you're next to talking to/looking at. It's just a giant if/if else block. Super basic, but it's all I had time for. If I were to pursue this further, I would likely create a better dialog system, potentially even adding in multiple dialogs, or even a tree/quest system.

Another area of focus was animation. I haven't used the animation functionality within Unity. So I wanted to do at least one basic animation, which was accomplished by the player moving. It was actually easier than I expected, and I was really happy with how the simple but effective animation turned out.

I also wanted to focus on my pixel art skills again with a limited color palette. I feel like I did a pretty good job with those limitations. I chose desert first, and then found a color palette that I thought worked really well with a desert theme.

Challenges:
I did have a huge blocker when I was having the wrong text show up for random signs and NPCs and it took me way too long to figure out why it was happening. When I was going into the OnTrigger code, I forgot to check the collision against the Player, and instead, the collisions were happening all the time against other colliders I had in place (NPCs and signs have multiple colliders, one to make them a solid object, and one for the 'interaction area", which is a trigger), causing all of the NPC/Sign triggers to trigger every time randomly. Once I limited to collisions against the Player, everything started behaving correctly.

Also, this time around, I had a hard time coming up with compelling theme ideas, even though I really liked the theme. This got me started later than I expected.

The room creation process was very time consuming, and I restarted at least twice trying to come up with a system that would work best. Next time, I want to get more familiar with the tile system in Unity so it can hopefully make that process more streamlined.

Thank you so much for dropping by and taking the time to read my thoughts about this game jam! I hope you enjoyed the game, and please go play it if you haven't tried it. Leave some comments and feedback! 

Thanks!
ATTX