the making of studio apart(ment)

hi there!

if you're seeing this i'm hoping you played my game (and enjoyed it). i just wanted to document some of the choices i made and why i made them.

the idea

the theme was "one room." my first thought was a one screen (essentially room) puzzle game but i think those are pretty common in game jams. i thought about a one room platformer but none of the ideas i had for it really worked. i've been playing a lot of overcooked recently and it definitely inspired the gameplay a lot. i thought of an isometric life sim (i've been wanting to make an isometric game for a while now) and the idea just clicked.

artistic choices

i decided ahead of time to use a limited color palette. i am very happy with this choice. i already love looking at color palettes so i picked this one which had 4 colors and kind of had a cozy feel to it.

problems with the isometric grid: like mentioned before, the game was isometric and i had never made an isometric game, never mind isometric art. something i didn't know is that games have different angles (like 27 degrees) for isometric grids than art does (flat 30 degrees). all the workstations were made in krita using an isometric grid, but krita is not great for isometric stuff or animation in general (if i had something like procreate i think it would have been better)

player art: making player art is never fun, especially when you need 3 different animations PER DIRECTION like i did. i have been learning blender recently and i thought it would make sense to make a simple character and then render it from 4 angles for easy editing. adding these into unity was actually a little difficult since i'm not very familiar with the animation system but it was a great learning experience for learning about blend trees and animation controllers. surprisingly, the whole implementation of player art only took about 3 hours (including making it)

coding stuff

i used a star for pathfinding despite never having used it (thats a recurring theme). i followed several brackeys tutorials throughout the course of making this game, which were incredibly helpful. a star is really great and actually was really easy to set up and get working, although i did have to write some annoying logic.

getting the workstations to trigger was really annoying since i wanted the player to have to be near the workstation to use it. it might not sound hard, and it's really not, but i eventually just found the distance between the mouse and the player and checked if it was below a certain threshold. 

game design stuff

i don't know how fun the game is. i didn't get to playtest it. ideally, there would have been short little minigames during each interactions (i wanted to make the interaction for the washing machine a little game where you have to drag laundry into a basket) but i ran out of time and boring buttons were just easier. maybe i'll change this stuff in a post-jam version. who knows.

thanks for reading this lengthy post.