After spending maybe a week building and testing a launcher for the game, and putting this website together primarily as a vehicle for hosting said launcher, it’s time for me to get back into the game code!
I learned a few interesting things while building the launcher – namely, how to connect to a server and how to manipulate files and folders, things I had never really had to do in the game code outside of creating a save file in a persistent location.
So that opened up all kinds of ideas about storing more information on the storage side, but since the game is single-player and has a very small data footprint (at the moment), it’s not imperative to move things to the server. If it were a multiplayer game, I would care more about cheat prevention, and if it were a big game, I would care more about hard drive bloat… but it’s neither of those things. Should the game become either of those things, there will be a big enough architecture rewrite that it would be worth the time to shift things server-side and create a database for storing character info.
Instead, I am going to continue to focus on a single-player, non-graphical experience, which means it’s time to make the game MORE INTERESTING.
The next step for me is to start looking into the years prior to age 12. The game currently starts at age 12, which made sense to me when I was first putting it together… but I have since decided that building a relationship with the character is going to be better if they start at the beginning.
Why?
Because while this is a game about sports, this is also a game about families. Were your parents supportive of your goals? Did they try to push you to become something or someone you didn’t want to be? Did you ever bond with them over sports, or music, or reading?
In the game right now, your starting character doesn’t even HAVE parents, much less a relationship with them. Parental interaction doesn’t begin until the first generation has its own children. I’d like to change that.
So the next steps for me will be:
- Implementing more defined growth curves between the ages of 0 and 12
- Adjusting the starting world to populate with a more diverse range of ages
- Simulating the first 25 or so years of the game in order to give the starting character a set of pre-existing parents
- Adding developmental interactions between parents and children
- Creating activities for children to do that help give the user broader insight into their development progress and potential
Some things I’d like to start building beyond that include:
- More interpersonal relationships (friends, coaches, teachers)
- Some personalities/personal qualities
- A better interface
Interface is a very weak point for me. While I’ve had no training or even exposure to C# or Unity prior to starting this project, I’ve had very little experience with UI design, and it’s definitely more challenging for me than coding, because it is far more subjective.
When you write code, it works or it doesn’t. There are subjective elements to it (did you write GOOD code? Does it NEED to be optimized?), but people playing the game aren’t generally looking at the code and forming opinions about it.
UI, on the other hand, is exactly what people are seeing and judging, and I have not taken the time to learn about UI principles, mostly because it’s been enough just learning how to program a game in the first place.
Perhaps I will take the time to study UI more. Or if one of you would like to try your hand at implementing a better interface, I’m open to the idea.
For now, though, I’ll keep adding what I can to what I’ve managed to chuck together so far. An interface rewrite will be largely dependent upon how serious I want to get with this project.
In the meantime – I’m off to make children!
Thanks for taking the time to read this, you’re a wonderful person.