The Game

You just entered your new house, but it looks rather empty. Use the store on your phone to buy some new stuff.

Buying items with higher satisfaction will gain you more money an hour. Try to get rich, but be careful you don't run out of space.

Controls:

W,A,S,D Is used to move around.

Left mouse button is used to drag objects (You are weak)

Right mouse button is used to interact with objects (doors, switches on the wall, Radio and others)

Keyboard arrow up will show your phone.

Keyboard arrow down will hide your phone.

Scroll on the phone like you do in real life, drag the screen with the mouse, don't use the scroll wheel ;)

We started brainstorming on the Ludum Dare as we were browsing through the categories. We picked a few topics and directly found some matches as we thought we had some great ideas.

Then the topic was revealed we panicked a bit as this was the only theme we didn't brainstorm about. After roughly half an hour we landed on the hoarding theme, as running out of space is one of the main issues a hoarder has to deal with. The prototype was done in only a few hours. All this while prior to the topic reveal, Perry had to reinstall windows. Peter had some Unity crashes because the project was stored in Dropbox.

But... We managed to get our game completed in 24 hours. Something was still lacking though... We did some more brainstorming and we decided to completely overhaul the game, adding over a hundred more items to the store, adding free items, adding special items, adding police that patrols for a clean neighborhood, adding a penalty for littering and adding a garbage truck. After that, we did a round of bug fixes. Created the logos and some final polishing to make sure you get the best game possible given the time frame.

Actually, this is the first game we worked on together with Skype as our main communication method.

Why we did things the way they are

>, For example, the drag and dropping of items its tricky, because every object has its own mass that's correct of its size and material it had me make a drag system that works for everything, so we had it make it work as is. Perry also did not have all the time in the world to work on it so a strength system was added. You start off weak, but you can buy a special item that would double your strength, this effect can be stacked unlimited times, but its something to work to.

> About 24 hours in we got some feedback about not be able to order multiple objects at the same time, and even though its not an issue to add in code, but on the phone it can be, because everything is on 1 page, all 100+ items, it might be harder to use with the option to select many. There's also the issue with the box as the box cannot get any bigger, what if you order 5 big objects, will that still fit the box? In the end, we chose to play it safe and limited it to 1 item, but depending on the item, you can buy a higher number of them.

The things we struggled with

The phone was one of the first things that we build, but we kept adding new things to it, the core code was never built for it and it ended up a real mess in the code. We tried to clean it up as much we could but in the end we gave up and just went with it, now that we look back it would have been better if we started with a more stable code base for it, but then again we had only limited time.

Perry did most of the programming while Peter worked on the animations and the system for the delivery truck, police and garbage truck when it was time to connect these two systems together we had many unexpected bugs. The two systems actually integrated seamlessly but something was wrong. It took us a few hours to find out what went wrong and we even had a build where it just ran out of memory and give a black screen. In the end, it turned out to be a simple issue and was resolved fast after that.

The game included about 110 items now, we had selected 280 beforehand we wanted to add, again while Perry did some phone programming, it was Peter that created all the items for the dag, but after 2 hours or so, he quit, it was just to much work.

Creating the items required to much work because we did not have the time to make proper tools to create them, even though Peter made a small tool to make it easier it was still not great. We had a chat about it and decided that 100 or so is good because we still had to add text to them and test them all.

A small break down of this utility which we will improve upon:

Since we had roughly 110 prop items from the asset pack we wanted them to be purchasable. These where 3D objects so we needed sprites. Peter created a small editor script that takes a screenshot from a given prefab, this script also replaced the item database name as the assets had a name like: "PropSmallTable_01". The script also did a small lookup in the resources folder and assigned the screenshot to the sprite reference of the item database game objects. Once that is done the script auto updated the prefab. This helped us out as we didn't have to manually assign the sprite in the editor for every single object. Preparing one item (position object in scene, take a screenshot, assigning the screenshot to the item database object, fill in the name, save the prefab, delete the object from the scene, rinse and repeat) took up about 4 minutes for each object, since Unity takes its time to reference the screenshot taken. With the script, this time was reduced to roughly 1 minute for each object. The next iteration will feature an asset post processor and a better system to bulk process the actual data. We are thinking about a price value based on volume and a few parameters to procedurally generate the prices. A similar system can be used for the description, while we still have the freedom to manually edit the fields and descriptions.

As for the audio in the game, we wanted to have interaction sounds for each object but we stranded on a couple of issues that took away the time dedicated to the audio. In future versions, we do plan a more robust system with interaction sounds, as well for more in-depth interactive props and environment.

We had a chat after we completed everything and looked back on the game, the limited time we had for it we managed to make a game that's fun to play and works great, I think there are 1 or 2 tiny bugs still in there but that's ok. Afterall this was the first time we 2 worked together like this!

Made in Unity3D

Asset used:

Nit'ras Interactive: Handy Editor Scripts / Handy Tools

RealisticPhysics: Realistic Water Physics 3

Synthy Studios: Simple house, town, and props

Audio: Police Siren: FatLane (Freesound.org) Car Horn: mariadrrs (Freesound.org) _

Developed by Doos Games http://doosgames.com

Perry Engelbracht (ImtehQ)

Programming, UI, Physics http://www.realisticPhysics.com

Peter Eeckelaert (Confituur)

Level design, Sound, and Animations, Additional programming https://www.nitras.be

Hot Fix

-Fixed the bug where mass was calculated incorrectly resulting in a apple having 130 mass.

-Fixed the issue that it was possible in the web build to lose the ability to move objects.

-Re uploaded the windows version to because I updated a wrong version.

-Uploaded a version with inverted Y mouse controls.

-Updated the webversion.