The Cage - Devlog #0

Game Idea of The Cage

This is the first project after my first ldjam. Results of the jam was more than satisfying for me. (Actually i was happy that I could managed to produce a game in 48 hours) So I followed the same way for my next project. Choose a random word and tried to create a game out of it. And that word was "cage".  

I considered many different ideas. A bird that tries to reach its cage might be a good platformer puzzle game. Or maybe a hamster tries to breaks out its cage might be fps parkour game. But personally I'm a big fan of basic artstyles and lowpoly graphics. So why shouldn't I consider my random theme word "cage" as basic as possible? So I created a cube in blender and dug a hole in it. Which is a real abstract way to create a "cage" but work well for the theme. 

So the idea was: You are basically a cube and you roll to everywhere you wanna go. And you have to collect some points on the road. But if you can't collect the point with your open face, it will destroy or break or whatever. So this is first and main rule of the game. Then its time for some coding.

Build Process of The Cage

It took 9 days to get to level of this demo. I used unity as my main tool.  You can find day by day updates on my twitter account. 

First day was all about rolling the cube. Actually it was more challenging than i thought. Rolling was easy but I wasnt using any physics. Coded all movement manually as a coroutine. Grid based movement system seemed as a good idea for the concept but in order to make the movement smooth I sacrificed rigidbody physics. So this caused some major problems. The biggest one was the collisions of course. For following 1 or 2 days it kept passing through the walls and couldn't climb anywhere. Eventually I managed to produce a script which can tell the cage where are the walls and which ones are it can climb. It was a painful process for me. 

Day 4th and 5th was passed with building other mechanics, such as collectible points, finishing tiles etc. Also created a couple of sound effects on beepbox. 

On the 6th day I started to think about the UI and main menu. Game turned out so minimalistic and abstract so far, so I needed to design a main menu that suits these principles. So I came with a couple of pretty bad ideas you can check my 13th devlog on twitter to see how bad they were. But on 7th day I cancelled the UI idea. Game was really simple and i wanted to keep that sense. An extra interface to communicate with the player was gonna break the simplicity.  So I decided to integrate the main menu to main gameplay mechanic. And I think it worked very well. 

So on the last couple days I made a scoring system and levels scene. Created a background music on audiotool which was a whole different experience and it was so fun. Changed level loading animations a bit.  And made some polishing.

After all these I had a playable game. Now all I need  is some level design which is all I'm gonna do for the following week. But before that I decided to publish a demo at early stage so maybe I can get some contructive feedback for following days. So if you leave a comment I'll be appricieated. 

Also if you liked the idea you can follow my twitter account. I share day by day updates. Cause its #devtober :))

See ya!!

https://twitter.com/bizdemiolduk