Developer's Day Off

Developer's Day Off 

By Fiona Bolen, Ian Warren, Robert Breglio

Developer's Day Off is a puzzle platformer which allows the player to modify its own internals in a faux game engine. Click on objects to view their inspector, and toggle their components on and off to see what happens!

Our hope is that experimenting with these mechanics will give players a sense of how games function internally, and make game development a less intimidating prospect.

Process documentation: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1uOQ1WW5awu_xWmbh2itpBfbHYYBwsUgD97Dc2F1Lmwk/...

Original Prototype Reflection:

The core loop that we were testing with this prototype was moving and interacting with other objects while viewing their code, which this prototype successfully represented. The question we hoped to answer was whether or not the in-game inspector was a good way to express what was going on behind the scenes, and could do so in a way that was less intimidating than diving headfirst into the editor. From our playtest, we think the answer is yes, but it could be improved in terms of readability and could be made to be more interesting by building a more cohesive game rather than a small sandbox. 

If we were to change anything about this prototype, it would first and foremost be the current bugs with sprite renderers and coroutines not being disabled properly, followed by the addition of visual gizmos to represent interactions and AI states. We had planned for this going into the prototype, but unfortunately due to technical issues we didn’t have time. We also might consider adding an option to convert the code into pseudocode, as even with the heavy use of comments our current visualization may be too intimidating. 

We’re fairly interested in taking this idea further, and if we end up doing so, our main idea is to turn it into a sandbox puzzle game, where players are given impossible levels and are asked to make changes to objects in order to reach the goal. Because of the amount of options, this wouldn’t provide a great deal of challenge, but it would give more of an incentive to engage with the inspector and allow us to teach some concepts over time.