This version of the game was a result of participating in the Mini Jam Mini Jam 119: Heaven^2, a three day Game Jam that ended on November 13th. It was my first time developing a game with enough elements in it to really constitute as a game... it had a basic GUI with a main menu and a 'how to play', a game with some mechanics, and a game over screen. It was an awesome experience that really showed me my weaknesses and strengths, and it forced me to package something together for the first time into something that could be shared and played by others.

The Good

Starting from scratch, I was able to create the baseline framework for procedural generation of an endless runner style game. This was a lot more difficult than expected. My initial plan was to only develop a single fixed-width lane with obstacles in the middle, and fixed walls on the sides to define the allowable area. Once I had that working, the fixed-width size seemed too constraining, so I decided to expand the scope to include endless generation in not only the forward direction, but also on the left and right. 

Most of the difficulty in making endless spawning and despawning of areas with obstacles came from taking the single fixed-width lane codebase and quickly trying to expand it in the left an right directions. Each spawned section of play area, a chunk, is actually a 100x100 plane with obstacles pre-placed on it. I initially created a collection of 10 unique chunks like this, each with their own design of obstacles. As the player moves around in the world, the spawning system randomly chooses a chunk to spawn when a new area is needed. 

The final result was a pretty flexible and reusable system that can be used to expand this game, and can be used in future endless games.

The Bad

Probably 80% of the development time (roughly 20 hours) was spent creating and debugging the chunk spawning system. This left very little time for the development and fleshing out of all the other systems required for a game. 

I didn't have enough time to develop any interesting chunks for the spawning system - they remained the initial testing chunks I made while I was trying to get the spawning system to work. 

This was my first time developing a GUI and menus, and it definitely shows - they are stock UI buttons with no feedback. 

The character controller for the players soul sphere was a rough first pass that wasn't as precise and usable as I had hoped. 

The actual gameplay mechanics were also very rough - I intended the game to be a race away from a light that was trying to consume your soul, which I think was partially fulfilled, but there was very little context or reasoning provided to the player. A more fleshed out story and cutscenes to set the stage would have been better, along with a tutorial on how to play. 

Finally, the dice and skull aspect had no description or feedback to the player, making their presence confusing. These problems and more were captured by the great feedback and comments provided by other participants in the jam that helped rate my game.

Next Steps

I want to continue developing this game now that the game jam has completed and I can take more time to design and flesh out some of the features and gameplay. 

Initially I'm planning on adjusting the visuals to be more stylized, including implementing more pleasing colors that contrast the player, the obstacles and the resources more clearly. I also plan to spend some time developing many more chunks with interesting obstacles and geometries to challenge the player. 

Finally, I want to take some time to flesh out the overall objective and mechanics associated with the resources.