Taayakin's First Game: FOOL'S GOLD

 FOOL'S GOLD officially has its AudioManager created and implemented, along with its first SFX! 🎧 Now when Kenny has finished his MiningAction, and a LootDrop occurs there's a SFX; one for RealGold and one for FoolGold. 🔊

Updated and polished FOOL'S GOLD UI/Menus!! I'm just going to share one, so the others will be a surprise for when ya'll can play it for yourselves. 😄 🕹 Polished "How To Play" Menu Screen This post is a couple of days late, but it's been a very busy time! I'm hoping to have the finalized demo of FOOL'S GOLD hosted and playable in-browser by EOD tomorrow. It should be a realistic goal, as I only have to add the audio into the game, and the assets have already been selected and organized. 🙌

The final major game mechanic for FOOL'S GOLD version 1.0 has been created and implemented! 🥳 Check out the new Field of View toggle mechanic: I didn't get to work on FOOL'S GOLD hardly at all last week, but I'm thrilled to be making progress again! Between last night and the night before, I was able to create and implement the last main game mechanic I wanted to create for FOOL'S GOLD, a custom Field of View toggle mechanic. 🚀 I wanted Kenny's torch to do more, functionally, than just "exist". What if the torch could add an advantage strategically, even though equipping it would spend the player's main resource of time? This led to figuring out Kenny's line of sight, his field of view, shadowing the environment, and hiding the gold, all only when the pickaxe is equipped. Equipping the torch allows the player to see the whole cave and all the gold. 💡😀 Building this mechanic gave me the opportunity to learn about meshes, how to create my own

Been slow-moving on FOOL'S GOLD as my other responsibilities have prevented me from being able to spend much time on the game the past couple of days. However, FOOL'S GOLD officially had its first round of playtests (thanks to my awesome Binary Beast pals, inside joke 💚)!! I got some great feedback and was able to make some important gameplay tweaks. Plus, a few bugs were found and promptly handled. 💪 There's not much left in the game to do, but without much spare time during the week to dedicate to my passion project, I'll likely only be able to make small steps towards the finish line on this version of FOOL'S GOLD. The silver lining to this situation is that it's much more realistic, compared to the "Game Jam" pace where I cleared my schedule as much as possible haha. Getting some great practice in time management and keeping my life balanced. 🙌 Check out this post-playtest tweaks, gameplay clip! 😃

THE FIRST PLAYABLE, (rough, unpolished) DEMO/MVP VERSION OF FOOL'S GOLD_v1.0 IS COMPLETE!! 🎉  Gamplay tweaks are needed, I'm adding another game feature or two, audio, and of course polishing (particularly of the UI) is very needed haha.  But FOOL'S GOLD is officially playable!!!

  Still need to attach more logic to miningAction, but the core is finished! 😃 When Kenny "mines", the action will begin and end each interaction, the time it takes to mine will be a randomRange, and there is a custom UI Slider attached to randomMiningTime showing real-time progress %. Will be adding to the GUI, but this was a major improvement from the "animated valueless slider", fixedMiningTime version!

Kenny can now explore the whole cave!

 FOOL'S GOLD_v1.0 IS MOVIN' RIGHT ALONG! MIGHT EVEN BE COMPLETE BY THE END OF THE WEEKEND! 🙌😄🤞 Particle Effects Created and Functional! Kenny movin' so fast he's leavin' a dirt and dust trail behind!

 Our dynamic cursor logic, game timer, and backpack equip/unequip button are all created and functional! 😃

  We're making progress bringing FOOL'S GOLD back! 🥳 Check out the Menu Navigation and New HUD! Shiny New HUD!

 HE'S ALIVE!!! 🧟 Kenny Goldinski officially lives again!! He's back in his level, animated, and reacting to player input. Hurray!!!

  Now it's time to OFFICIALLY REVIVE KENNY!

 FOOL'S GOLD, Cave Level is officially recreated, and better than before! 💪 Before I knew it, the rebuild level was a MUCH larger and improved version! It was hard to avoid since I had already built it once, the process was so much easier. Increasing the scope simply meant doing more of the same, and the increase in efficiency made this extremely doable. The comparison in both layout and scope is very apparent when you compare the 2 versions directly, approximately scaled to each other! FOOL'S GOLD, Cave Level, version 1.0 FOOL'S GOLD, Cave Level, version 0.0

 I'm proud to say FOOL'S GOLD_v1.0 is on track and making fast progress! 🙌 The process really is much quicker the 2nd time around LOL. It's a lot easier when you've already built it once, know what assets to use, where to use them, etc.  However, building the level exactly the same would be way more work. Plus given it is a rebuild and much faster, it made sense to follow the same level design, but this time with a fresh, this time much larger, layout.  Check it out! The rebuild officially has walls and a background! Progress!

I made a presentation on FOOL'S GOLD_v0.0, the metadata loss and game corruption, where the game was built to, where it would've been built to, future version plans, the Unity course I used to learn, and an overview of the practice games made in that course.  Feel free to check that out  here .  ---------------------------------------------- After having some more time to process, and discussing the event with friends, I decided to give myself some grace. 😊 If it hadn't been for something out-of-my-control (like knowing in advance the hard lesson learned about Unity's metadata lol), I would've 100% finished the Game Jam on time, with a fully submitted game. And trying to rush to pump out a "Demo/Test" 💩 version of FOOL'S GOLD, just didn't feel good.  With these two truths in mind, I decided to accept that it was a wiser decision to let this submission date pass, and focus on bringing FOOL'S GOLD back to life!  After coding at "Game Jam&