To Plow or Note to Plow

Hello all, if you haven't guessed based on the title, my game will be about plowing snow and will be built in Unity as a 2D game

You will be playing as a plow truck - or I guess the person driving the truck - responsible for cleaning up the streets after a major snow fall has been forecasted in your area.

In each level you will have some time to look at and memorize the layout of the streets because when the snow falls, literally everything will be covered! It is your job to clear the streets without doing too much damage to cars, houses, the frozen pets, or whatever other precious things that may have ended up outside!

The town's people will only forgive so much damage before they fire you, but don't go too slow or you may still lose your job! 

To-Dos

1. Create plow truck - start simple with a square with a rectangle up front to represent the plow
2. Create map - start with a static image
3. Create some obstacles, like cars or houses - simple - will be squares 
4. Get movement of plow truck done
5. Set up basic collisions matrix 
6. Get pre-level start timer set up
7. Make snow and have it "fall" when timer is up and cover entire map
8.  Get level timer set up
9. Get level completion % set up 
10. Set up 'You Win'/'Lose' screens

Bonus stuff if I have time

• Make nice looking sprites
• Make animations for sprites
• Animate snow falling
• See if I can procedurally generate maps
• Physics - truck can slide around or when obstacles are hit they also move according to impact force - haven't used physics before
• Sound effects - I have no experience with audio

omg this premise is really good.... it's such a unique spin on "memory" style games and feels like it has a lot of embedded humor already. i can't wait to see this game!

Dev Log Update 1

Tasks Completed:

1. Created truck, background, one car obstacle, and snow sprites - all very basic shapes - looks bad lol
2. Plow truck movement completed and truck wont go offscreen
3. Added a start button currently to cover map with snow for testing

TODO:

1. Create timer which will control snow fall rather than the start button
2. Create start menu
3. Add collisions for plow truck and snow
4. Add collisions between plow truck and obstacles
5. Determine % damage done to collisions based on what part of the obstacle was hit (maybe use force to calculate damage done)
6. Determine % of map cleared of snow
7. Have requirement of winning level - do I want full map to be cleared or just roads? - if just roads need to determine which snow tile is on road tile to calculate % cleared - also need to then factor in obstacles in the way that shouldnt count against player
8. Add win/lose screen

Current Status (forgot to include car, but it honestly isnt much - will show it when collisions work)

Dev Log Update 2

I didn't make too much progress from the last time, but I learned a thing or two. 

I never have used rigid bodies in unity before and forces to create movement so this is a learning curve for me. So far my progress there has just been with googling what I need and just copy pasting since moving a car around is pretty standard stuff. 

But I did get to set up my collision matrix for the plow, the truck, obstacles, and snow. Now my plow can clean up snow properly but I'll add object pooling for all the snow objects eventually rather than creating and destroying them. 

Today I hope to add obstacles and make sure I can collide with them. I'll probably have different colliders all on a single obstacle with different damage values. For example, hitting the car side mirror will count as 5% damage  hitting the bumper will be 10% damage, and the sides of the car will be 15%. If I have time maybe I can use forces to determine a range of damage depending on how fast you're moving when you hit something. 

Dev Log Update 3

Got colliders working on a basic car as an obstacle and am able to show total damage dealt based on the parts of the car you've hit. 

I then tried to get a count of how much snow you have to clean to win. So I added a collider on the path itself where you need to plow, set the isTrigger property and made it so that only the Snow Layer can collide with the Road Layer, but it wasn't registering the anything ontriggerenter...so a bit stuck there.. will look at it with fresh eyes tomorrow. 

Tomorrow I'll also implement the timer to start the snow and if all goes well, I'll have a simple, 1 level game complete with horrible graphics lol

Dev Log Update 4

Made a lot of progress yesterday in terms of logic. Now I can specify a damage threshold - how many damage can you do to the environment before you lose - and also specify how much damage various things will take when hit and then show that on screen as a percentage damage dealt so the player knows when they are hitting too much stuff. 

So for example, if in the first level the damage threshold is 10 and the damage dealt when you hit a car's side mirror is 5, then when you hit that mirror, you'll be at 50% of the damage threshold. If you hit 2 mirrors, you'll lose. 

Still need to set up the 'you lose' screen though. 

But before I do that, I need to do a similar display for how much snow have you cleaned off the roads/driveways/etc to show how close you are to completing the level. Then I'll need to also show what parts of the level you need to clean and actually count towards level completion. 

The game idea is simple, but I'm surprised by how much logic it's taking to implement lol. 

If I can have both the damage threshold and snow plowed stuff show up on screen properly, I'll have another video to share cuz otherwise I just have been focused on the code lately. 

Dev Log Update 5

so still no new progress video/ image... honestly I want the first level working before I do show anything else and I'm soooooo close!

Yesterday I tried to get the logic in place to show how much snow you've cleaned as a percentage of snow cleaned / how much total snow that needs to be cleaned. I had some issues with calculating the total snow because I need to count how much snow is on the roads (don't need to clean snow on someone's yard for example) and then subtract any snow from obstacles that are on the roads you need to clean because you want to avoid the obstacles.

I have an idea on how to fix that now, so if ur works then i can work on those timers. 

Then once timers work i would like to have some way to indicate what parts of the map need to be cleaned and what obstacles to be avoided. 

But depending on time I might not do the indicators and instead make a bunch of more levels to play