Postmortem

For this game challenge the concept and idea was a bit simpler than the one before and I am pretty happy with how it turned out, as simple as it may be. I think that the fun aspect and enjoyment is there personally with the challenge of trying to find the source of all the audio clips while stuck in a maze. The building of the maze itself went smoothly especially with the help of Godot’s gridmaps and finding a maze generator to use as the layout. Creating the boxes for each clip was also very basic and thankfully not the boxes or the unlock plate/buttons needed their own personal code. I also included end and pause scenes which I originally didn’t plan but thought it better to include just to properly restart this time as compared to the other challenge games I had made before. That went probably the fastest as it was just recalling scenes I did for a game last year and double-checking with some videos. Overall, the code that is actually used in the final product is cut-down and simplified to what I was working with in the beginning and towards the middle. 

The biggest thing that went wrong is what I actually just ended up cutting out and completely scrapping it. When starting this project what I had in mind for the end puzzle was not a keypad kind of scenario which I ended up using. The end result was that you must listen to the full audio and then click on the buttons in the order of what you believe the clips should be. The original idea was to instead collect the audio boxes themselves throughout the maze and then at the end organize them in the proper order of the audio. This at first wasn’t going too bad. 

I had wanted to make an inventory/hotbar in which you could store the blocks and see them. I had found a straight-forward tutorial to help me with this and the creation of the inventory, hotbar, and item data was all kind of working pretty well. I had an array of all the blocks, and the hotbar looked and worked nicely by selecting the different slots and sliding between them. My issue was with the interactable part. The collision were working as the player’s raycast did detect them but it would not collect the block even though there didn’t seem to be any errors. My nodes and collisions for the blocks were different from the ones in the video but even when I had changed it and deleted/switched stuff around to match everything, spawn the item with a collision rather than have it already included, it didn’t work. It actually worked slightly better when I mashed up what I had with the tutorial and changed and made the code different. I had also tested it by using a print method and should have been working. After taking a bunch of hours to mess around and see if it could somehow work I ended up on just switching the plan. Not being able to actually take the block with you would make it more complex for the player to solve the end puzzle but it does add more of a challenge/fun towards the end. I did think about putting the clips at the end-puzzle for a moment but then the maze would have no purpose so I just continued with the simple idea. 

I kind of learned that maybe from the start I should’ve thought of the more simple but efficient idea from the start. I would still like to attempt making a hot bar and interactables not just for the knowledge but for the player’s convenience as I wanted to here, especially if for a larger scale game. Yet, this final version still gets the job done and the idea through while still being enjoyable. In a way maybe this was better overall as I still hadn’t gotten to the component of using the blocks and putting them in their spots with physics and signalling the player if they’re doing it correctly. I know that would have likely taken up way more time and frustration than I would like. In the end, if it really isn’t an aspect which you know must be included for your game to work the way you want, then maybe you should try to think up a few other ideas that are a bit more uncomplicated, but still get you to that final goal without frustrating you or the player from continuing the game.