Devlog #1 - Attach-Mend introduction

This is the first devlog for my game Attach-Mend, which is a DIY simulation type game. 

It was first conceived as an entry for a Game Jam in April 2022, but I'll go into that in a moment. First of all I'd like to give a quick intro about my Unity journey so far.

So, after following a few tutorials I began to realise that learning code from scratch was going to take a long time, especially now I'm getting close to half a century old...

I tried Bolt and thought that visual scripting would definitely be the way for me. A quick search on the asset store and I came across Game Creator, and it was on sale, sweet!

A year later and in my spare time (around 5-600 hours) I had created a demo of a 3rd person melee combat game with NPC battles and a village that can be raided called Grunt / Hench / Boss. The player can even headbut villagers and set them on fire, what else do you need?

Just as I had got to a stage where I was happy with this demo a game jam was announced, arranged by the Game Creator… creator. It was 10 days long, so I thought; yeah let's give this a go.

The theme was attachment and armed with my knowledge of 3rd person melee combat and village pillaging action mechanics I decided to do something, completely different… My concept was to have the player using attachments for his multi tool to complete some DIY jobs around the house in 1st person. 

I didn't have any related assets and I had no idea how I was going to do this. I also only had about 24 hours available over the 10 days.

To say the least, it was a bit of an embarrassment… The controls were jerky, the physics and mechanics were awful and the colliders just weren’t thought out properly. I only got as far as attaching shelf brackets to the wall and dropping a shelf onto them. This is a ‘ahem’ speedrun of how to do it… and this is how far the judges got… 

Needless to say, it didn’t do very well in the Jam. So I decided to start over and this time I thought I would have a crack at Game Creator 2.

So here we are, the current build is just a test of the ‘fitting of the shelf’ job. But this time the player will actually be able to drill the holes, change the attachments, screw the bracket to the wall and drop the shelf onto the brackets and there are even some prompts to assist in control functions.

So have a go, it’s playable in the browser!!!

Thanks for tuning in and more updates will be coming along soon enough.