Role: Lead Developer and Designer
Year: June-November 2024
Engine: Unity
Platform: Desktop
Target Audience: Pick up and play easy and fun.
Available at: N/A

Description:

This was a WIP that I was trying to make, however I rapidly end up overscoping and the project became too much. I think it can still be salvaged but it requires some serious downsizing, and focusing on a simpler loop that I can add things too. It is meant to be a novel take on a fat princess meets team buddies, based around funghi with a slightly higher focus on crafting items.

What did I do:

• The bulk of this project was scripting behaviours.
• A lot of focus on Nav Mesh and AI behaviours.
• Created a simple loop for one character (Builder) and was in the process of connecting up 2 others (warrior and queen).
  
  

Challenges:

This project is a passion one, and as such I got carried away and overscoped it very rapidly.
I had a series of tasks I would check off on my trello, but there was also a lot of going backwards. I would script something, it would work, then I would realise a little later on, perhaps a couple of weeks, there was a better way to approach the problem. So there was a lot of optimisation which again led to burn out because I didnt feel like I was making progress despite putting in lots of time.
I also changed the way the resources worked, so as seen in the first video it initially was a 2×2 grid inspired by a PS1 game ‘Team Buddies’, which then got upgraded to a 3×3 grid, but I realised it created a bottleneck for players and for AI behaviours and meant everything centralised around the resource grid. Which was inefficient for 30+ players. So I got rid of it and went for a more traditional collect mushroom resource, take to building, spawn cap, become class.
The next issue which can be seen in the second video, was the stuttering, this was caused by me updating their behaviours on a coroutine instead of a unity event, because I was a novice at using events.
This issue wasnt noticeable on smaller matches, but larger matches it was because they were all updating at the same time. So to move away from this I moved it into update, fixed the code, to stop the stuttering, then learned more about events, and changed it to an event that triggers on a change, when a resource is collected or dropped. And it updates for all the AI characters. these fixes can be seen in the third video when it runs very smooth like butter.