Whoops.
I would like to take a moment to talk about my MiniLD #28 project and what went wrong though.
Bakery: Make $ome Dough is “lemonade stand” on steroids. Your bakery is a front for a secret drug operation, and the goal is to make $1,000,000 as fast as possible without getting caught.
Each day the player determines how many of each baked good they produce, as well as the number of narcotics. The baked goods sell automatically, and their sale keeps your disguise level high while also providing small profits. The real excitement and core gameplay revolves around drug sales.
The player must sell the narcotics as subtlety as possible without blowing their cover. Asking a few innocent questions is key to separating buyers from normal customers or undercover detectives. Too much questioning, however, and you end up looking suspicious or losing valuable customers.
So that’s the gist of the game. Why didn’t it get finished?
First and foremost, Unity is simultaneously awesome and the absolute worst sometimes. I encountered a bug with the development environment itself that cost me roughly 4 hours of time on the first day. Given this amount of time I could have made the game functioning on a basic level, however that isn’t the primary reason I held off on submitting. The problem was the game in its current state is not all that compelling.
Most of the gameplay revolves around picking up on subtle clues in the customer dialogue and offering the right item as well as monitoring sales to keep the bakery stocked. That’s alright, but it gets really boring after about a day or two. The dialog system isn’t robust enough to support even 10 minutes of interesting gameplay, and this is simply something that needs a lot of timing and writing.
Secondly, the intensity of the game is currently static. There are many planned features, such as a popularity rating that increases the flow of customers (and consequently makes deals that much riskier!) that would have created interesting challenges and intense moments. I spent way too long wrestling with Unity’s GUI system getting it to function properly to implement these features in a satisfying capacity, and there are dozens of other wishlist features that I knew were totally outside the scope but am nonetheless disappointed to lack.
And finally, it is incredibly poorly organized. The script files right now are a mess of nested functions and switches and variables that piled up due to poor planning. The main script file is an absolute nightmare to read at over 1200 lines and counting. Admittedly this is one of my weak spots as a developer and something I will improve on.
What went right then?
I still believe the core concept is very cool and has a lot of potential to be an intense experience. The graphics aren’t all that bad considering the time that went into them, and I learned a lot more about developing in Unity. It is technically playable in its current state, and there are entertaining moments where the dynamic dialogue system generates some interesting scenarios. I will continue to work on the game in my free time, and hopefully one day I can bring it to everyone in proper form.
Thanks for reading.
