alright here we go
title: shape shifter
engine: unity personal edition
premise: this is basically like a playable promo of a bigger game! it's about a circle who accidentally finds itself in a world of squares. and you have to help it find its way back! it starts out with a sky of stars (which are actually just shapes) and then there's a shooting star and the title screen fades in, and then the options fade in (start, options, quit). when you start, you're brought into a room where everything is made of squares. you can click around and explore and get a sense of the world and once you've explored everything, a box starts moving. you have to catch it by clicking it, but it escapes and rolls into a bunch of stuff in the corner. you use the mouse to throw the stuff out of the way to reveal a scared circle.
and that's it.
i know, that seems weird to make a game about but i wanted to focus on doing something really tiny but polished? i've programmed games like tic tac toe, and card games, etc before so i wanted to use this game jam to play with unity and make a super simple but pretty point-and-click game. i've very loosely played with unity before but i wanted to use the time to make a literal minute-length game with all of the functions working vs a v messy longer game (also i'm working alone and i have a lot of other stuff to do haha and i'm primarily a music person so! i wanted to make it just challenging enough, you know?)
anyway
unity is hella frustrating! i played around with defold and i was going to use that but characters have to be in spine json format and i really didn't want to bother with that esp b/c the only free software that exports into spine json format on mac was this annoying software called dragonbones and i tried to use it beforehand and nope nopety nope. so then i played around with godot and nope nope nope maybe i'm just really bad at learning how to use software but ??? idk i could go on about that process but eventually i went with the free version of unity b/c it at least has a big enough community that i knew any problem i had was bound to be on the internet somewhere. however. it was a frustrating learning curve today. for a lot of different reasons that maybe i'll use another devlog to go into but right now i'll just show you guys two screenshots of what i have.
this is what the title screen looks like so far
this is the background of the scene i described, however you'll only see this through an open window probably.
my plan tomorrow:
- create the shapes for the stars (squares, circles, triangles, other polygons)
- program them to randomly generate a star-studded sky
- program to fade in the title
- create the buttons
- maybe program those too