Hi all, 

Today I uploaded my game Pixel Farmer. Here are some of my experiences making it.

I have only ever made 3D games. This project was a very steep learning curve for me, but very much worth it in the end. It was the first time I ever opened Aseprite to make all the pixel art for the game. Even though this might not have complicated physics or much movement, I feel like it was the perfect project to introduce me to 2D games, pixel art, and all that comes with it. 

The Idea

I was very heavily inspired by this video from WinterMute Digital for the design, as well as the mechanics for the game. I hadn't even watched the entire video before jumping into my own project to try and figure things out myself. This ended up being a mistake, as the final design turned out to be a little too similar to the original, hence why I don't claim the idea in any way. 

The Project

I wrote down everything I thought the game needed on my whiteboard, as well as how the code behind them would work. I say everything, but I really mean what I thought was everything, as the game ended up needing a lot more features and implementations I simply hadn't thought of, which made implementing them later a little more difficult than I would have liked. 

The hardest challenge was definitely the console parser. Figuring out how to parse commands that the player inputs and doing something with them was quite the task. However, once figured out, it was just a matter of implementing a few new lines for each new command due to the way I wrote the parser, which I am very happy with.

The Pixel Art

Having never touched a single sprite editor before, it was a daunting task for me. Nonetheless, I was very enthusiastic about making a little peaceful farming simulator game.  I looked up how to make Isometric sprites and made the sprite according to those dimensions.  Importing them to Unity went okay, although I think I could have used some better ways of aligning the sprites with each other. 

Conclusion

This project is yet another one to add to my completed portfolio list. Overall, I am very content with the things I managed to do in such a short time and the things I learned will definitely stick with me for future projects and games.