Feed the birds...

saluk on 2009/09/04 05:04 of 9thCentury of the Fruitbat Limited Productions of Diminuitive Proportions and 1000 elephants

Hooray!  The interface for feeding the bird has finally been built, and it's a riot. Imperfect art aside, it's pretty fun to try and give the bird his meal while at the same time not being pecked.  You don't know for sure if he will like what you are trying to feed him, and if he hates it, you are in for pain.

So far, this feeding interface is really the only game-like element of our game so far. I am a bit worried that we are this far along in the week and there is not really any gameplay to speak of. We brainstormed a lot of ways that there could be gameplay at the beginning of the week, but I'm not sure how well it can all be put together at this point.

A lot of it will hinge on where the food, toys, etc are coming from. Originally you had to go to the store and pick them up, but we felt like we couldn't handle more than one room with our limited time, so we have the wife bring them by instead. But what does she bring exactly, and when? If she brings the wrong things you could lose purely by chance.

Hopefully enough of the game will be implemented tomorrow that we can really work on balancing the sliders to make it somewhat playable.

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Comments

milker on 2009/09/04 11:11:

"Come, buy my bags full of crumbs.

Come feed the little birds, show them you care
And you'll be glad if you do.
Their young ones are hungry,
Their nests are so bare;
All it takes is tuppence from you."

ServalKatze on 2009/09/08 15:59:

Uh... the wife just carried a "Order wife to get something" into the room. But I couldn't use it because it was on the kitchen entrance. Is that normal? XD

gcewing on 2009/09/09 00:41:

How exactly are you supposed to drop things in the bowl? Is clicking required? I can't seem to do it reliably -- I click all over the place and nothing happens, then the object apparently decides to drop into the bowl all by itself.

And nothing I do with the pill, cloth or syringe seems to have any effect at all.

saluk on 2009/09/10 02:50:

Unfortunately it's not really finished.  You can drop things in the bowl if you hit the hotspot just right, no clicking is required.

Lol nice find ServalKatze.

This is a classic case of a game that was much too experimental to attempt on a week where we were all very busy with other things. I think it may have been workable if I had had more time to focus on it, but the crunch time on Saturday when we really needed to connect the dots just didn't happen.

While we had a pretty decent plan going in, this was one of those cases where the more we learned about how the game was going to work, how long certain things would take to make work right (for instance, deciding what things the parrot wanted), and how little time we actually could devote to it, the more we had to keep changing the plan. Having to change the plan almost constantly is not a good sign :)