A Year Spent Looking at One Room


There was a point today where I was working on a new object for our new game, appropriately titled 'The Caveman Idea' in my unity project folder, that I had realized it had been over a year since I had written down the initial concept.

I really can't believe how it's been that long, but the date of the files on my google drive that I hastily wrote at 2am last August confirmed it. It's interesting to me how addicted I can get to ideas that I just happen upon. I don't have much of a discovery for what to do next, and I don't have any kind of wise philosophy about how to find the next best creative invention, nor do I think I'd be the one to execute on that. But really, if I had that kind of self-confidence, I probably wouldn't have been up at 2am on my phone. Really, the idea is probably a reflection of games I was playing at the time, my anxiety for performing well at my new job, and/or just wanting to play something that didn't totally exist the way it did in my brain.

I remember waking up the next day and thinking how dumb of an idea it was, but for whatever reason I stuck to it and drew up some quick prototypes, here's the first image of one I can find:

 

 

I never said it was gonna look great, but hey it's not so bad for a sleep deprived associate software engineer messing around in blender in between bouts of worrying about rent that week. 

 

 This prototype was done around 8/20/23:

 

All I can do now is shake my head at how bad this picture looks (great job on centering the camera, champ). This wasn't in editor, but even still I don't think any of this actually survived till later. I'm glad too cause it looks real bad and I don't know what I really would do with any of it now. Except the lizard guy. I still like him. He's coming back in the future for sure. The project ended up being put on the back burner for a few months before I would have time to work on it again. Development would continue in my spare time around the mid November of 2023.

12/10/23


 

First in editor image I could find. At this point, we had basic movement and a functional state system, but not much else. This was also around the time I was using Unity since before college so it had been a while. The file and scene structure is a lot prettier now, I promise.

 

 2/01/24

 

A lot closer to the way our game looks now visually.


5/27/24

 
 
 

I remember this being the point where we were ready to start making big changes and I think it reflects when you view the past couple images to this one. There's a lot of differences, most I think work pretty well for what we are trying to achieve. 

 

 7/16/24

 

Its weird trying to come up with reasons to not like this one cause it was only a month ago and I like me from a month ago so I'll give it a pass.

 

8/24/24

  

 

It's come a long way over the past year. We've done a lot of remodeling, changed art styles a bit and played around a lot with different colors and trying our best to make sure things look the way we want. I'm glad I went through this little exercise. I'll probably look back at this post every once in a while when I'm feeling like I'm not making much progress as a way to make myself realize how far we've come so far. Who knows, maybe next year, it'll look that much better.

Well anyways, that's all I have to show for now. I'm hoping to have some kind of demo or so up sometime over the next few months so be sure to check back every once in a while!

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