My Personal Role: Creator (Just about everything)
Client: Columbia College Chicago(Simulation and Serious Games)
Client: Columbia College Chicago(Simulation and Serious Games)
The "Zoo Project" was a resource management game played entirely in a series of menu screens. The player needed to manage aspects of a Zoo including staff, ticket cost, enclosures and expenses for animals in order to maintain a profit for their space. If after 360 days the player still had any money left they would win. If at any point they run out of money for more than a week they lose on the spot.
Players: Single Player
Controller: Mouse and Keyboard
Players: Single Player
Controller: Mouse and Keyboard
Background
The project puts the player in the position of a Zoo owner needing to manage their expenses while keeping the animals they take on happy. They must purchase and build enclosures for animals that meet their specific needs as well as hire staff and pay upkeep to keep animals content. Animals can be made unhappy by having not enough staff between them, having the wrong enclosure specs, not having enough of their own species to meet their social needs, and especially when the zoo is in the negative funds wise they will be very averse to the lacking quality of the food they are given. Guests will visit based on a number of factors as well, whether the animals are happy, how popular the types of animals in the zoo are, the cost of admittance and how long the zoo has been around to increase its popularity. Ultimately each of these systems were functional in the final piece but not well balanced for challenge and a few rather basic pieces such as a main menu were sacrificed for filling out the systems before the deadline.
Takeaways
Looking back on this project it was more of a lesson in what not to do than in what to do. The point of this piece was to practice making systems for a project that were very math-heavy and had a lot going on behind the scenes that the player would need to be informed of or at least have the opportunity to experiment with in order to understand how it works. Ultimately it could use a visual and function pass which I believe I could easily correct today. The code is dense and difficult to read because I didn't know of etiquette rules that I adhere to today. The UI is poorly arranged and important buttons are easily missed. Rules and tutorials are pretty much absent save for experimentation by the player. Worst of all, the UI all hugs the center of the screen and becomes difficult to read even at high resolutions. All together this piece taught me a few things. Foremost that there are some pieces to any project that you are going to need if you want to pass it as finished, like basic control tutorials and a main menu. Perhaps more important however, I learned that just because "your piece" of a project operates as you intended it doesn't save the project from looking awful if you ignore all others. Yes the primary systems are functional so the programming assets are perfectly good considering my ability at the time. This does not excuse how far it falls short in Art, UI, Sound and Basic Design.
This is the editor view of the project. Menus were designed one at a time and allowed to lay on top of each other because I didn't find a way to get them to respond to code without being active prior to the project launching. I've since learned but the piece remains a lesson in the necessity of completion.
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Highlights and Comments
At the time I made this piece I was more concerned with making systems functional for what I wanted than with any type of visual contribution. This project had plenty cut from it compared to my original vision for it but deadlines and poor practices sunk it somewhat. This is a piece I would like to revisit but would be best served if I redid it from scratch. The mess that makes up the code is hardly what I'd call salvageable and minor glitches make the UI difficult to navigate. I know I could redo the whole piece many times better in almost the same amount of time and this time have a Main menu, tutorial and finished looking button interfaces.