ouse,dev-diary 2025
It's time for a new project. Having reevaluated where each of the projects are, their scope and their usability, I decided that it's time to go back to basics and start afresh.
This new project has hints of the style of my first title, Escape the Farm, but mixes this with the more manic nature of games like Overcooked. It's title: Wherehouse
Wherehouse is a manic puzzle-platformer where players manage a warehouse, fulfilling delivery requests from the stock on your shelves.
I have turned over a new chapter recently, resolving to be more disciplined in a variety of ways (See my Blog on TDD) and this includes the overall design and development process of the games I build. The discipline in question is to do with overall architecture design, but also applies well to the general Agile workflow. The principle is to defer any decisions that can be deferred until such as time as they become necessary. At first this sounds counter-intuitive. In traditional Design, deferring decisions means flying blind and a lack of planning almost always leads to compromise later down the line. But for software architecture, there is no way of knowing the shape and requirements of your system, and so early decisions are at best informed guesses and at worst crippling impositions. Far better to defer the decision, mock or make-do where you can, and build the system in such a way that you can make the necessary changes in the future.
This approach echoes the clean coding principles of architectural design, and also asssits in building and verifying early-stage Minimum Viable Products (MVP)s.
With this, say hello to what I hope to become a staple of my early stage designs, Pill Bill. Pill Bill is a stand-in for a player or character.
[Image of the Pill Bill]
So our first stage is to get this guy moving, picking up and dropping objects. With all the visuals aside, it's relatively quick to get this up and running.
[Video of picking up and dropping boxes]
Next up is to create a place where deliveries need to go. In the future this might be a collection counter, or a lorry, but for now it'll just be a blue box. It becomes immediately apparent that this basically halts the game, as when that box is delivered, it disappears and the player has nothing more to do. So we'll need a sort of respawn mechanic. While we're at it, let's add 'orders' that need to be fulfilled and increase the score when they're completed.
[Video of delivering boxes]
This is looking really good. We've already got basically all our core game loop up and running. Since I've got something to show people, I'll already be able to ask for feedback, and that - as I mentioned earlier - is the main goal.