'Game' submitted.

It's done. I'm happy I submitted, I'm not happy with what I submitted.

Theme

I chose a different angle on the theme as I'm too ignorant in the one it was obviously leaning on. I wanted to make something about a pride of lions. I did some reading and learned that lions are often threatened by animals such as giraffes, hippopotamuses, rhinos, elephants etc. These larger animals are known for stomping on lions! That was my angle. 

Apparently it's common for a pride of lions to consist of several lionesses and their cubs and two lions who are not in relationships with the lionesses in the pride. Weird! 

I decided the playful cub was the weak point and the lioness would be the hero, as lions are lazy AF. I wanted to capture the smooth, chilled walk of a lioness which happened to slow down the gameplay, which I wanted to do for my 5 year old.

Goals

1. Not quitting due to hating my concept ✅
2. Submitting within the time frame ✅
3. Making a game that my 5 year old wanted to play ❎

Successes 

1. Slower paced game to suit a 5 year old's skill level 
2. No violence 
3. Dipped my toes into animation 
4. Used NavMesh and NavMeshAgent
5. Scoped fairly well
6. It built without much trouble
7. Maintained healthy lifestyle

Missing

Lacking from the original plan are the following:

1. Roaming enemy animals (giraffe, hippopotamus, elephant)
2. Random placement of animals to encourage repeat play through
3. Respawning cubs and/or multiple cubs per round
4. Proper art direction
5. Interesting background environment
6. Animated Pride and enemy animals 
7. Win state fanfare
8. Emotive faces in speech bubbles above cub (communicate goal better)
9. Title and intro screen
10. Any sort of challenge
11. Much more polish...

Broken

1. Spawn checking for cub – it's possible to spawn the cub inside the enemy
2. Cub follow behaviour – sometimes cub will not follow after hitting enemy animal

Take aways

I overcame a personal challenge to get over my own pursuit of perfection which has plagued me in the last few game jams where I've ended up bailing half way through. I put too much pressure on myself to come up with a genius core game loop and then end up hating everything I do during the jam until I quit. 

I already had an idea where the game fell short as the deadline approached and I was fine with that because I was going to submit no matter what. I showed my daughter and she loved the concept of walking around as a lioness collecting her cub but said "that's a bit easy isn't it?", followed by "does it get harder?" haha. I told her that was the plan and that got her excited.

I'm getting better at scoping down but need to come up with better ideas.

The future of this 'game'

I might do just enough work to this to get it so my daughter enjoys playing this for multiple rounds. She's basically my only inspiration to continue this one as I have lots of other things to learn.