Devlog

Devlog: Alien Business Tycoon

On April 21st, I was thinking about the theme "ecosystem" and ended up coming up with an idea for a balance game where players would have to manage something. On April 22nd, I thought about the idea more and decided to make it more fun by creating a story around it: an alien on Earth trying to accumulate as much money as possible by supporting various extraterrestrial companies. On April 23rd, I finalized the idea and began working on the basic game.

On April 24th, I started creating the menu and everything else for the game. On April 25th, I didn't have much time, so I came up with names for the companies (which I later expanded upon). On April 26th, I programmed the costs and effects. However, I ran into problems with the coding engine "Scratch", which I was using. The simple code became much more complicated, and it took me a lot of time and self-control to overcome these challenges.

On April 27th, I spent a lot of time debugging, but there were still many glitches in the game. On April 28th, I was about to give up on the project because, at one point, players suddenly went into negative money. On April 29th, I made a new decision: I would release the game even if it was unplayable and glitchy.

On April 30th, I worked on the game for almost 10 hours. I adjusted the effects and prices, but the game was still extremely unbalanced, and many things (such as resources) had no effect. I tried to make the game more playable, and eventually, I uploaded it. However, it was still very user-unfriendly in the end.

In conclusion, I learned a lot during the course of this project. Firstly, I learned the importance of time management. I wasted a lot of time on unimportant things and didn't work enough on some days while working too much on others, especially towards the end. Secondly, I realized that I had underestimated the complexity of having so many different companies in the game, making it too complicated. Thirdly, I learned the importance of including a tutorial as players had difficulty knowing what to do. Finally, I discovered the significance of user-friendliness, especially in distinguishing numbers like 5416086587 from 65298466, which was almost 100 times smaller.

Despite the challenges faced, I'm pleased that I was able to learn so much from this experience, and I'm proud that I was able to submit something, unlike my previous attempts.