Pond Scum is a game I developed while in school to practice my C# sharp coding skills. The game was created using the unity game engine. This was my first real project using C#. This project was done without a plan and all aspects of it were made up on the fly. This made the project take much longer than it should have. I completed this game in about 5 months.
You may not realize that a game is much more than just code. A game requires art, sound, UI, UX design. Those are the obvious parts plus a game requires a good fun idea and gameplay. To actually finish an idea it requires careful planning and a deadline that you must stick too.
Basic Gameplay:
You are a single celled organism who must constantly eat or risk dying. If you do not eat you will start to shrink and eventually die. You can eat algae that surrounds you or kill other life forms by shooting them with a barb that you can fire like a bullet. In order to progress to the next map you need to lay eggs and feed them to a special animal that will create a way to escape once it is fed an adequate amount of your eggs.
The catch is is that the eggs are you lives. If you die and you do not have other cells or eggs game is over. Not a problem initially things are easy. Eventually you will need to hatch some of these eggs in order to service and to help you hunt for food.
Mistakes I Made:
Some issues I had were when I designed the enemies I did not use any base classes or any of the advanced things you tell you you need. I started out designing and coding every single enemy from scratch. Just like making every single level this can be a painful and time consuming process.
Feature creep and a constant need to change things or fine tune them but never being satisfied with how they work or simple over complicating things.
Another thing was that I always prefer a game that can generate random levels. This keeps me from having to sit and pump out enough content to make a long enough experience for the player. Also it makes the game endlessly repayable. Unfortunately I was not able to implement this.
My game lacks music, it still bothers me but trying to make it myself would probably have meant that I didn't finish it on time or at all. I could not find a suitable free software synth to use to make music. I was unable to find any free music that fit the theme and pace of the game.
Some Good Things:
However, there were some things I felt were really cool that I worked into the game. For example I created an auto waypoint system for the enemies. The system works on a random distribution of "enemy width balls" that are dropped int0 the map evenly in a grid pattern. Any ball that is inside a level feature is auto deleted. The remaining balls then create line-of -site paths to each other. the paths are also enemy width, not just straight lines and they account for any snags that could happen. A map of all possible paths is then created. Each enemy gets a list from the nearest waypoint that shows which other waypoints are nearest to its current position. The enemy knows at all times all options of paths it can take at any given time. This is only used during idle times when the enemy sees a player is strays from the way points to hunt them down.
