okay, listen. I know the name is a little rough, but it catches the eye, and was the most fun thing i could think of.
The assignment Slishing came from was in the second semester of my first year of college. at the beginning of the project, my professor had the entire class write down 3 things: a genera, a character, and a mechanic. in retrospect, it was pretty obvious that we were picking mechanics for other students to use, but a lot of us did not realizied this, leading to my prompt being a open world game, with a slime character, and a fishing mechanic. this lead to slishing: slimy fishing.
For those of you who are not very familiar with game design: making a decent,(let along good) open world game is one of the most time consuming syles of level design. obviously it takes a while to just design a whole map that is large enough to be considered "open-world", but beyond making a map, to make a fun open-world game there needs to be enough around the map that keeps you active and busy.(think Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild's map)
For Slishing, I want to share more of my creative process. when I first got my prompt, I was actually really excited. I only realized how difficult it would end up being after asking for some help from TA time (a program my department lets freshmen use where the teacher's assistants can help them with programming 1 on 1.) and every time one of the TAs learned my assignment, they would ask how the professor let me choose it for a second semester project.
The first step for any project is beta, where you show off what you have been able to complete, and prove that your project is possible. because of that, the beta milestone needs to be what we call "feature complete".(meaning that the main mechanics of the game work) the first things I needed to work on was mostly programming, so I created a small island with 2 lakes in the middle, one a deeper shade of blue(refered to as deep) and one a lighter shade(refered to as shallow).
(this part is going to get a little more technical, beware!) just to preface, I utilized the help of the TAs A LOT, almost every day it was available. so firstly, I made the character's model, which was pretty fun, the slime design i made used a little core in the center with eyes, and i used a bunch of spring joints to make it essentially rattle arround in the slime and anchor to the center. the hardest thing to program which took up most of my time was the fishing mechanic. to make every body of water have different fishes in it, each one has a list of scriptable objects attatched to it, each of those scriptable objects have things attached to it(name of the fish, a thumbnail image, ect.). whenever the player goes fishing in a body of water, the game will pick a random fish from the list of scriptable objects, which can also be weighted differently, by just putting multiple of the same scriptable object in the list.
At the same time of all that programming, I also worked on designing the map of the island the game would take place on, here's some pictures of that:
after the beta milestone had passed, I moved on to creating the island map in-engine. this took a bit of time, because the tool I used to shape the ground and place trees across it was not very well documented by Unity(at least, not recently documented.), and none of the TAs were familiar with it either. the other thing that was added in this stage of development was dialog, which was painfully brute-forced, being mostly coppied code until it worked well enough. but hey, it does work!
so here's the game's trailer I had to make too! it's about as goofy as the name of the game, but it works!
