https://valyagolev.itch.io/mania-condos
I always wanted to do a flatshare sim! It's such a strange and rich experience!
As a programmer I am inclined to just code instead of making a real game, so in this one I designed a very simple mechanic and force myself to do some real game and narrative design. It doesn't go well but it's something.
Inspired by Cultist Simulator, Rimworld, Alchemy, Tarot, etc
My experiences so far (while it's building).
Game Design:
* The rule is very simple: you put cards, some combinations replace the cards with other cards, and you can't have two cards of the same kind in the same room. That might be too simple - but I want to see how far I can push this.
* The rules are such because I didn't want anyone to count. This limits the amount of similar cards on the table and pushes me into inventing a narrative, rather than some kind of economics-driven game
* Now I have to figure out how to tell any kind of a decent story with rules so simple. Already on the narrative side I have both so many options (I can design whatever cards!), but at the same time it's not very clear how the narrative should exactly progress. I'm trying some things and drawing lots of diagrams. They look like chemical formulas.
* I think the implicit goal will be to just discover many cards. I want a lot of cards and strange ways to find them. Like in "Alchemy". So probably a screen with all the discovered cards will be important.
* Watching GDC talks in background really helps with inspiration, but when it strikes, I switch to music.
Tech Evolution:
* I prototyped it at first with Haskell, using threepenny-gui, because writing logic for such a game in Haskell is super easy. The game was ugly but strangely engaging (maybe it's just me procrastinating writing the game). Writing it in Haskell was actually not bad! But it was clear that it's much harder to share a game written like that with somebody - so I decided to finally learn enough Unity to make it nice.
* I don't know much Unity so I tried to hack my way into it by just coding everything (I'm a maniac programmer). After some time though, I started to discover some cool Unity features, so I ended up just watching Youtube unity tutorials on the train.
* Right now I'm building WebGL build to share, but it doesn't work. Will debug and then hopefully post a tiny build with a tiny game here.
So I just learned that you can't use async/await in your code for WebGL because JS is obviously not threaded there. At least, you can't use some of the things. And I was so clever with async/await for my animations. I rewrote the code, and will have to learn the Unity style of doing those things. But I have my working WebGL build:
