Common Grounds

This is Common Grounds, a game for My First Game Jam: Winter 2020.  It's a game about making coffee for a few people and seeing how they're affected, understanding what is best for them.

Admittedly, this is my second game jam, but its my first Unity game jam game and the first narrative / character heavy game I've done. It draws from the game "Eternal Home Floristry", which was a lot of my inspiration, with more of a mechanic similar to VA-11 Hall-A, which I've never played but I've heard good things and it was sort of what I wanted to make. Unfortunately I had no artists on my side, and 2 weeks turned out to be not enough, so I don't believe it is as well executed as either of it's inspirations.

The theme for this game jam was "Cold" which is mostly background. If I had artists, it would probably be more heavily featured, but the general idea is that since it's a coffee shop, people are coming in to escape the cold. 

Overall, I'm pretty happy with it and I begrudgingly learned a lot about Unity's UI system. A lot of hangups resulted in me doing most of the writing on the last day.  In part, this is good because I sort of did it all at once, but simultaneously it's bad because I'm exhausted of it and I don't want to fix the small things anymore and just publish it.  This means there are probably small bugs I didn't notice, as well as typos and tiny things that are not ideal. Regardless, I'm happy with it, and I'm glad I have something to turn in, even if it's not as big as I originally scoped and it's more of a visual novel than something with gameplay.

My final thoughts are as follows: narrative is complex and annoying to write on the final day, and the systems I built for dialogue and coffee making kept being rebuilt when I should have architectured them from the beginning to fit my needs. Obvious Things I knew before I started, but I put them here as a reminder to my future self.