This is a game I did for a 48 hour game jam with Evan Schipellite, Robert Bethune and Samantha Ovitt. If you haven't played the game yet and are interested in the full experience it would be best to play before reading this. Olly Olly Oxen Free is a game where the main character thinks he is playing hide and seek but is actually at their funeral. My main focus on this game was creating the player, buses, and interactions between them.
I started out by working on the player controls. I have the player hopping because the art for our character is egg shaped. The jump on the character came out feeling weird. At first it was just a jump where you went the direction you were currently moving and couldn't change directions in the air. I later found out this made it too hard to land on the buses so I changed it so that while your in the air he moves in the direction he is facing. This kinda works but as you'll see from playing the game it is not comfortable. Given more time I would have liked to prefect these controls and make it feel much better while in the air.
I also worked on the bus movement. At first I was trying to make a system where the buses could go around in circles and go from point to point but then realized that this was unnecessarily complicated for this project, given the amount of time we had left. So instead I just made a simple system where the buses would move back and forth between two points at a given speed. From here I made the interactions between the buses and the player. I had a invisible trigger box in front of the bus that when the player walked in it the bus would stop. I also created a system where when the player collided with the bus he would become a child of the bus and therefore move and rotate with it. In hindsight this wasn't the best idea because rotating with the bus with the way it snaps does not look right. I should of just made it so that he moved with the bus as not to slide off it rather then being parented by the bus.
Although there are many things I think could of came out better, I still learned a lot while doing this project. I learned more how the unity system works, and how not to do certain things. I also learned that I need to priorities more on future projects. I spent too much time on a feature that we never used, so in the future I'll be sure to ask myself if what I am doing is really necessary for the current project.
