For this assignment I decided to stick with my food organizing game idea and tried to figure out the general form, look, and mechanics of the game.
Test 1: Form
The first prototypes that I made were visualizing the form of the game. I did a few sketches of different ideas I had for the perspective of the game.
At first I really wanted to do an isometric view with a static camera, but I found that especially with containers (i.e. fridge, pantry) that have a lot of depth, half the inside of said containers would be blocked by the sides/walls of the containers. So although it fits my idea of the aesthetics, functionally and technically, the isometric view would pose some serious challenges when trying to arrange or organize food items in the deep ends of the containers.
Another idea I had was to have an orthographic front view of a fridge so that it would really resemble Tetris in its 2D perspective and general two dimensional stacking and arranging mechanics. With this approach, however, I feel like it is missing the mechanics of organizing things from back to front or vice versa. The third dimension gives a bit more opportunity to arrange the food items in different ways and also allows for more items in general.
The last approach I thought of was this first person view of the fridge that would be much closer to the fridge itself, viewing it in a shelf-by-shelf perspective. In the other approaches, the camera would be static, however, with this approach, the player would get a degree of movement with the camera, navigating up and down the levels of the fridge. This perspective has the best of both worlds, with the player being able to organize the food items in a three dimensional space while also being able to see the entire inside of the fridge.
Test 2: Look
For my second prototype, I did a bit of an overall look and feel prototype. I used Blender to make a few quick renders that give an idea of the lighting and color scheme I wanted to go for and also tested out a few different camera angles. This gave me a general idea for the camera angle and look I want to recreate in Unity. Also in my original sketch for this zoomed in view, I had it angled to be viewing the fridge straight on, and after messing around with the camera position and rotation, I found that this camera angle slightly off to the side gives enough perspective of the inside of the fridge but also allows the player to reach the door compartments of the fridge.
On top of the renders, I also added a sketch of UI elements that I mocked up in Figma. I still need to do some work on what the actual UI will look like in comparison to the game view and also do some studying on how to make the UI stand out a bit from the game plane.
I also experimented with different ways to show the player’s grocery inventory. Honestly, all of these could work, but I'm a bit partial to the tab that slides up from the bottom to the button. however, the use of tab begs for more tabs, and I don't really have any other items that need to be sorted (unless I categorize the groceries - an idea!).
Test 3: Mechanics
For my third prototype, I did a code/tech prototype in Unity to understand the overall mechanics of the game. The player can navigate up and down using UI buttons that moves them up and down the fridge. The player can click on an item and use WASD to rotate the item and also click and drag to move the item.
I haven't touched coding or Unity in a really long time, so it took a bit of time just to relearn how everything works. Lots of Googling and YouTube tutorials later, I started with trying to code the camera movement with just a simple click that would move the camera to three set positions. That transitioned into a UI element pretty quickly because I wanted to reserve the click function for selecting objects and dragging.
Next was to figure out the click and drag function. I found this one YouTube tutorial that gave me some basic code, but I found that it was really difficult to move objects in the Z-axis, so it needs some work.
I then worked on the rotation of the objects. I first had that on right click, but then changed it to WASD because the right click didn't give the broader range of motion that I wanted.