Journal Entry 9 - Matouš the šotouš

I didn't really write devlogs during the creation of our Project C - Matouš the Šotouš. So I will write one larger one now. 

(The game is described on the main page so I won't really write what the game is about.)

I created this game with my friend Filip Bedoya (https://bedoyaf.itch.io/). We already created 2 projects together on game-jams so we knew how to develop a game in a pair already a tiny bit.

The idea of the game came randomly when we mind-stormed random ideas. We thought it could be fun to create a game about travelling Prague in tram 23 (because we just love the tram so much). So we developed the idea from there. We knew that it would be much easier to develop the game in pair if we had two different scenes where we would do our own separate things. We came up with the idea to have like a calm scene where you can prepare (and maybe upgrade) for the second more action-based scene.

So I did most of the calmer scene inside the tram and Filip did most of the action-based scene outside (the calmer scene was a bit easier to do so I then also moved to developing the scene outside).  We also used github for sharing and saving our progress and used a premade .gitignore project for using unity with git.

A lot of my time was consumed by creating the assets which were all made by us except for the view from the window. I first created everything for the scene inside the tram but because Filip's designe didn't really match the design of the inside of the tram I also repainted all the objects in the outside scene (it still doesn't look that good but I think it was still and improvement).

From programming perspective the biggest challenge was probably saving the characters and their "wishes" when the scene changes (had to do some shenanigans with DontDestroyOnLoad etc.). Also changing the speed of the character based on what tile is he standing on was new for me and a bit challenging actually.
The biggest time consumer for me and Filip was a bug with the random generation of the different markets. For some reason it showed an error when the scene was reloaded about missing sprites even though the sprites were there. After few hours of both of us trying to figure it out I found out it was because of the order in which the objects were loaded which can be changed in the project's preferences.

The thing I love the most is the soundtrack we made which is Vltava by Bedřich Smetana. I wanted to create an old retor 8-bit song for the game because of it's pixel style. I thought it would be quite fun if we used Vltava because it's set in Prague but obviously I couldn't find any 8-bit version of it. What I found were midi files of Vltava that someone created. I also found a program called  GXSCC (on their page the description is "GXSCC is a wonderful program that emulates a Famicom (NES) or SCC sound chip in order to play MIDIs."). I combined these things and created an 8-bit version of Vltava (and also Dvořák's "symphony 9 from the New World" but I didn't use that in the game). I think the result sounds really great and I had to use it also in the trailer. (For the trailer I used ClipChamp and had a terrible experience so I won't be using that in the future even though I believe the trailer looks OK).

Some things that we didn't have time to include was for example a money system where you could get money from the people and expand your tram by buying new wagons and larger inventory. We also forgot to include a smaller menu when 'ESC' is pressed so that the player can restart and quit whenever he wants. We also wanted to have more levels (based on Prague) and more tiles but we just didn't have that much time to implement all these things. 

In the end I'm quite proud of what we made because I believe it looks great and it's quite original (the tram theme and even the "crowd simulator" idea itself).