Tournamental - Postmortem
November 14, 2023
Project Role: Mechanic/Puzzle Design
Project Length: 1 Month
Skills:
Mechanic Design
Puzzle Design
Trello
Unreal Engine 5
Tournamental is a prototype/template for tile based game. My goal for this project was to read the codebase, plan out a mechanic on Trello, create and implement the mechanic, and finally showcase it in 3 short and sweat level. I would then go on to Trello once more and find someone else Trello card and them implement there mechanic with mine. I would then showcase both mechanics in 3 to 4 levels.
First Mechanic: Magnet Tile
Second Mechanic: Darkness Tile
What Went Right!
Mechanic Met My Expectations - When I first started making the magnet tile I was struggling to see my vision implemented, I couldnt see what I needed to do to make it all work. But when I finished I was genuinely happy about how it all turned out.
Trello Card Management - I used Trello to map out both mechanics, making sure I made a checklist, set dates for things to be done, commenting and messaged partners, and attached images.
First Mechanic Trello Card - First mechanic was a magnet tile and button. The magnet would push/pull objects and the buttom would switch between the 2 states, but it didnt start out that way. The first idea was to have multiple different types of magnet tiles. A positive tile, negitive tile, rotating tile, and magnet tile that could be switched on and off. After going through the checklist and implementing the code, I changed my idea to only one tile that could change rotation but couldnt be turned off.
Second Mechanic Trello Card - The second mechanic is a Darkness Tile and LightBox. If a player moves into an area that is in Darkness, the player dies and has to reset the map. This card was made by a different person who had already made there mechanic. What I wanted to do was take the infomation they provided and see if I could recreate there mechanic while adding my own spin. This was a fun experience.
Feedback - Finding audio and visual feedback for the mechanic went really smooth and was the thing I had the easiest time with.
What Went Wrong!
Reading The Codebase - At first I had trouble reading the codebase. It had been a while since I had did Blueprints and the code for a tile base game was completely foreign to me.
What Mechanic Should I Create - At first I struggled to come up with an idea that I found interesting and engaging. This was around the time I was looking at the codebase; deciding what I could and couldnt do based my own skills. I wanted the mechanic to be challanging but not crushing. I ended up settling on a Magnet Tile that could change direction during setup, and could change its state based on a button tile.
Puzzle Making - This was the first time I ever attempted to make puzzles for a tile-based game. I delved into the intricate process of crafting puzzles, navigating through the challenges and nuances that come with designing engaging and thought-provoking challenges within the constraints of a tile-based gaming environment.
Pushbox Teleport - At this point I had gotten the Pushbox to be pushed or pulled based on the magnets direction, they only problem was how it moved. It looked like it moved tile by tile but behind the scenes it was just teleporting from in front of the magnet tile, to the end of the tilemap. The box would ignore all Wall and Pit tiles to get to its destination. From this point forward I had to make the Pushbox move incremently from ttile to tile.
Darkness Tile Code Location - This was a basic mistake. I was having trouble figuring out where I wanted to place the main code for the LightBox lighting system. At first I placed it in the LightBox itself but later I moved it to the Darkness Tile because of a problem with finding the other tiles and adding them to an array.
Conclusion:
Overall, the project went well. I really liked the sprints for both the second and third mechanic because of how challenging it was to balance them along with a different project I was working on alongside this one.