Tile-Based Mechanics

Introduction: At Full Sail University one of our many class projects consisted of familiarizing with and iterating on an in-work project. We were to develop one mechanic ourselves, and follow along our peers instructions to ingrate their mechanic. Attempting to marry the two mechanics to create compelling gameplay. The mechanic I chose to implement is the "Action Counter" inspired by the counter used in the game Helltakers.

What Went Right:

Workflow - My first sprint went very well, and integration of my mechanic was finished very quickly. I had a method and plan in mind before I edited any code, and by doing so wasted no time when the moment came to do the legwork. Proper planning in the early stages can set the tone for the entire project.

Consistency - During our second sprint I did my best to keep a good thing going and to set a plan down before moving forward. This paid off and made integration of new mechanics and ideas easier, and with the planning I had in my earlier sprint, I tried to make my additions as modular as I could because I was concerned about interfering with my peers' workflows when they attempted to integrate my mechanic.

Time for Creativity - I expected the creative process of my level design to be time consuming for my second sprint. Luckily this means I had a lot of time set aside to focus on exploring these mechanics on my own and seeing what I could invoke from the player with each puzzle. Originally, I wanted to design my levels around pixel art themes. Every level is a new picture, but after just the first level, I realized that was easier said than done given my time frame. I instead decided to pivot my focus towards creating visually and mentally challenging puzzles. I tried to play around with "noise" in the level designs to see how much or how little I was able to obscure the solution to the player.

What Went Wrong:

Debugging - Encountering bugs is a guarantee in software development, but boy did my bugs bog me down. Any time I encountered an issue I found myself almost panicking, racing through my mind what different ways I could rewrite everything to solve the problem. In the end the most glaring bug fixes weren't the ones I stressed about for over an hour. They were the ones that required calm thought and a rubber duck (Or in my case, a rabbit).

Communication - Using Click-Up our class assigned and organized our various tasks and choreographed them accordingly to our workflows. During our second sprint I wasn't as responsive and attentive with my peers as I would have liked to be. It showed me I need to make more of a point to set aside more time for collaborations.

Research - My creative process was very undirected and unstructured. At a certain point in level design I felt like I was spinning my wheels in the sand, throwing things at the wall and seeing what stuck. In the future I'll spend more time researching and more carefully identifying the aspects I want to take inspiration from.

Conclusion: I learned a lot about myself, and the intricacies of my own creative process. Thanks to the challenges afforded to me in this project I was able to identify key aspects of my workflow that can be improved built off of. Before this project I had yet to really work on tile-based experiences and data-driven programming. I'm inspired and motivated to take the things I've learned from my mentors and peers forward into my personal and professional work.