We're Cramming

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This weekend was a humbling experience in game development. I thought a text adventure would be such a narrow scope there was no way that I couldn't finish in two weeks. It didn't occur to me that trying to create a text adventure comes with all of its own technical challenges.

Right now, after following the tutorial mentioned in my last post, the game does not have any kind of player object. Having a player would make sense for my mind so that you could add objects to the player like an inventory in a game. Maybe this just doesn't make any sense to a coder or game developer. This tutorial has a game controller which handles the interactions and commands issued by the player. Players can enter commands to take, use, examine, go, and view their inventory. Take, use, and go are all relatively straight forward and don't seem to need any adjustments as far as I can tell so far. The whole system should be expandable in a way that should require so much manual additions beyond what is required to layout a text adventure.

At one point in the tutorial, I believe the instructor mentioned that the inventory isn't necessarily something that holds objects so much as hides objects so they're not visible when in the room. Objects seem to be added to a dictionary that you can refer to once added to the inventory. The issue I'm finding is that you cannot examine an item unless you are in the room where it is assigned. While this might not be a huge deal if a player examined an item once and moved on, but it has created a block in my mind that I'm not interested in moving forward on the design of this game unless I can examine objects at a later time. It does not make sense that a player can only examine it in the room. If anything, they should only be able to examine the item once they've taken it.

My limited experience in C# has created an obstacle that I don't know how to surmount. With time and testing, I think I can figure it out, but it continues to highlight my uninterest in solving coding challenges. This wasn't boding well for a challenge in a limited time unless I'm content to move forward with something that I don't like.

This got me thinking that maybe I ought to just try to make a basic 2D platformer since I have the Corgi 2D asset. I'm not sure if two weeks would be enough time, but I might also enjoy the learning process a bit more. After poking around with TBAs, I found a fun documentary on the subject called Get Lamp. The love the fans have the genre set me out to find something to play. I quickly realized that the games that have either survived or are made in recent history are very sophisticated compared to what I'm able to do at the moment in Unity. Multiplayer blows my mind. Multi-user Dungeons (MUDs) were something that I was always kind impressed by, but I can't help that I'm a junkie for the pixels. They're impressive, but I often find myself only reading the text when I need to know where to go. One problem that I have is the text is something that just fills your screen once you have a mental map. I may check out Written Realms a bit more because it has such a clean web page and a little more interaction with a mouse to avoid more typing.

I wanted to do something that seemed feasible and instead I found different challenges. I realized that TBAs are something that I appreciate, but don't really care too much to play. There are just too many great games. Speaking of which, Zelda Tears of the Kingdom and Baldurs Gate 3 are going to be huge distractions over the next several weeks. At least I'll feel less guilty if I go into the game jam with zero preparation.

Making games is really difficult as a weekend hobby.