At the start of this year (or March), I was experimenting with a game about Stoats. I became fascinated by their behaviour and one such unique feature of theirs was their ‘War Dance’ (See youtube).
TLDR: I sadly didn’t finish my project, too much time needed to refractor the code and game mechanics. Have made the choice to move on to the next game and learn something new.
Link to game -> https://pokedev8.itch.io/stoat-music-game
Short story on my mini journey on this game
I tried to make a rhythm game based on a Stoat catching a Rabbit. Sadly, 8 months down the line and I had gotten to the point whereby, with the amount of refractoring I was putting into the game to improve the code and game mechanics, it would probably be easier for me to restart the whole game from scratch (but at least the assets were available to reuse and wouldn’t take time to redo).
Very quickly during the development journey of this game, I found my code was running parts of the games from scripts that shouldn’t be running those parts of the code, and spent a lot of time tidying up where possible. I actually initially had a really god idea for how the rhythm part of the game would work. I had no idea that by today, I had redone the music rhythm code 3 times as each one ran into problems. It also makes you realise how wonderful video tutorials are, as the tutorials show you how to do it. When you try to make a game yourself, sometimes you get really lucky and your code works. In my case, everytime I got code to work, a month later it would break a new idea I had further down the line.
I am really glad that, outside of using unity and coding, I read up a bit about time management and reading and watching videos on how to stay motivated and focused on my project. There are soooo many things I would of done differently and managed tasks to myself to help me stay focused and potentially to realise how my code should of been laid out.
Its a shame I couldn’t finish the game off to what I would of liked. I still have another collaboration that I am working with another friend of mine to come, but I also feel that although I didn’t finish this project off, now is the right time to give it a rest and try something new (and something easier?)
Hope this will provide those looking to make a rhythm game with some ideas.