For this assignment, we were asked to created a game with one interaction. The original idea for the game and what I ended up making, were pretty different. Frankly, I broke it. But it was a fun learning experience. 

The Idea

I wanted to create a bar-tending game, with the goal of highlighting the stressful nature of the job. With 8 years experience in the hospitality industry, I have the experience to say it’s pretty damn stressful. The idea is that customers would come into the bar, and you as the player character would have to serve them. Failure to serve them quick enough would increase your stress meter and success would increase your score (or tips). I wanted to create a top-down arcade style game which would encourage competitive play with a scoreboard. If I had time, I was planning on building in different customer types you would have to serve in different ways, power-ups and power-downs.

Power ups may increase your Stress but would decreases your Health bar or vice versa. This was a mechanic I wanted to include to highlight the often unhealthy lifestyle habits commonly found within the industry.  If I had time I also wanted to add a server to the scene who would act similar to the customers in that you would have to serve them, but also added bonuses to the player.

 Looking back now, I can see this was pretty ambitious taking into account the time limit and the fact I’m still learning how to use Unity and Maya.

The Reality

Unfortunately, what I made was rather broke. I tried to adapt code I had used in a series of Unity tutorials, but somehow in the combination mish-mash something (read: everything) broke. Instead of the customers moving to the bar, they swarmed behind the bar, and focused on the center point. instead of standing waiting to be served. They have script to increase the stress of the character, but somehow that didn’t work. The player character attack script no longer functioned either, so there was no way to stop the customers. What was supposed to be a top down stress-based game was in fact proving to be rather stressful to make.

Lessons Learnt

I know now that I need to spend a little more time with the scripts in Unity. It’s a great tool, but in order to achieve what I want, I’m going to have to have more control over the components of the game. I fully intend to come back and fix this later, but for now, onto the next assignment.