Design Blog 2 - Sunshine RV

Sprint 2 has just concluded and already we have so much work done! So far, we have finished texturing the model for the RV and also included some variants to the RV texture so that other RVs in the park do not look exactly the same. With the RV finished, we are finally able to start building the interior of the RV where the player will be spending most of their time. At the moment we have the Sunshine still modeled and textured as well as some counters to fill in the  main areas of the RV interior so it is starting to look more and more like an RV .

As for the work that the engineering department did, they were able to get the foundation for the inventory system running very well.  We now have a script that allows the player to push a button that adds items to the player's inventory. This is critical because that is the system we will be using in the future when the player is able to buy glassware for their Sunshine concoctions. In addition to being able to add items to the player inventory, the player is also able to organize their inventory as they see fit. The reason I wanted to give the player the choice of organization is because everyone has their own ways of organizing things that makes the most sense. So, if the player knows what is where in their inventory as opposed to a chaotic inventory, they will find it a lot easier to perform the core game loop without experiencing too much challenge.

As for our specialists, we have our 2D artist working on drawing each different concoction that the player will be able to brew. These images are going to be visible for the player in the form of orders that appear in front of the order window as well as the status window that allows the player to check on their inventory and orders. An decision that I had to make as a designer was how these images would be created. I was in between drawing each order individually or just drawing the components of the order individually and compositing them into a script that would be able to generate an order image based on the components. Since one of our values at Bootleg Studios is simplicity, we decided to choose the former route and, while there are currently 64 different possible orders, our 2D artist is drawing them out extremely fast and I couldn't be happier with her. While the latter method of creating orders would be a lot more complex, I can see it being a useful method if we wanted to make a specific component of a drink, say maybe the honey flavoring, more rare to be on an order so that the player doesn't always get orders for drinks that yield more money from selling. However, I still view it as too much work for my team than is necessary because we can just make each order as a whole more or less rare than the rest and we wouldn't have to work harder to achieve that feature.

To finish things off, I am glad to be able to share that we were able to get a good prototype of Sunshine RV so that we can show people the vision of Sunshine RV. Unfortunately, we do not have our core game loop implemented at the moment but we are close enough to be able to make that our goal for sprint 3. As for right now, we were able to create a Google Form for our prototype and have our awesome team members share the early version of the game with their close friends and family so that we can test how we are doing in terms of foundational work so that we do not have to backtrack too far on some mistakes we may or may not have made. In order to test this, I added questions on the form that pertain to the game's vision. One question reads, "Based on what you played in the prototype, what type of game do you think Sunshine RV is?" I wrote this as an open-ended question because I wanted to know what Sunshine RV made players feel like they were playing and all of the responses mentioned feeling like it was a simulation game. This is amazing news as that is the genre of gameplay that we are striving to create in Sunshine RV. Moving forward, I want to aim at making the player feel like they are also playing an arcade game. This should be attributed by the end of sprint 3 so stay updated on our Sunshine RV posts.