As is the case with most well planned games, the vast majority of the design work went into the engineering. The game concept isn't MASSIVE for Crayon Legend. It's an object finding puzzle game. But there was a TON of 'how do we get the game to allow 1 of 10,000 items to have a rigidbody without melting unity?' work that had to be done.
Like Mad King's Lair, Tome of Destruction and Adult Toy Store to Another World the puzzle engineering is everything. When creating A.T.S. I designed 'Please Pass the Soy Sauce' which you can read about over on the Patreon. But that plugin allows the mechanics for this game to work flawlessly.
Now that we're nearing release, and I'm designing the Release Puzzles, the environment needs to be completely linked. Since I've worked out the Lag, and made it so that the game will run on a toaster, and validated that the Controller controls work, my main focus is on making sure that there's a place for every puzzle element. As such, I've designed all of the nooks and crannies. Which then needed to be covered up with something.
This is a 're-design' of a game I made my kids when they were VERY young. As such, the characters and story were already something I'd written. This silly little puzzle world driven by color and the emotions everyday people struggle to keep in balance requires a core of fairly deep, simple, and consistent art to tell a story which doesn't distract. I've aimed for something very Spyro in our core design.
My wife and kids keep popping in to see the progress, and tell me when something doesn't look like it aligns.
Each of the Crayonian Nobles has a theme not only for their vice, but for their lifestyle. (Alchemy, Food, Books, Treasure, etc.), and each of the 47 rooms (which are incrementally unlocked) has its own theme for pickup items. Basically, anything larger than a loaf of bread but smaller than a chair can be fed to the Mimic. But it will only ask for those items in areas you have unlocked. So in order to prevent the game from feeling 'Samey', there are 40 themes, (7 colors, 5 core rooms, and some branch rooms).
That comes out to about 1000 surfaces which need to be placed, as well as about 5000 decorations, and then the actual pickup prefabs and the powerup spawners. So this phase is about making sure that I'm putting out all of the individual furniture themed in a way which is both unique to the area and cohesive to the game as a whole.
I have a couple of colliders to fix, but once the Furniture is all placed, I need to create the 45 Collection Prefabs which I will then place into the rooms. Then I wire the room events to check their contents on load/puzzle start. Connecting the Items, to the Rooms, to the Mimic is how this all works. So that will be the next big step prior to turning on the Timers and the Save System.
Assuming all goes well, I expect to be building those prefabs in a week. I think we're still on deck for an August release of the game. So I'll hand off a tour of the finished building once I've gotten all of the furniture in and checked the collisions. I've got a community question which I'll leave up. As always, thank you for taking the time to read, both here, and on Patreon. I'm really excited to get this into gamer hands! β₯
-Brandon