Week 3 - Walking Simulator - A pure walking sim

This week's goal was a small walking simulator in Unity, based on David Wehle's 7 day challenge. By the end of the week, as I predicted, I didn't have a finished game. I only managed to squeeze in the walking and I created some of the ambience, with trees and environmental sounds. Last week I thought that in such case I'd give myself another week to finish it. But I've decided against it and uploaded it as it is now. I'll tell you why in a second, but first - here's the thing: A pure walking sim by President of Space (itch.io)

The 7-day course consists generally of downloading assets from Unity asset store and modifying them to suit our idea and vision. This allows for quickly creating a nice looking, simple game, that can nevertheless be compelling and interesting, and David does pretty amazing things on camera, creating striking visuals seemingly out of nowhere. But even though I kind of enjoyed tweaking the level and the post-processing effects to create a specific look, this is not my modus operandi at all. At the end I hated it and didn't want to do it anymore.

The thing is, I don't much care for black boxes. I accept some, because I don't want to write my own sound mixers or bitmap renderers or other platform interfaces, but I like to have control over what my game does and why. And Unity is one huge black box full of tiny black boxes, and when downloading stock assets I'm adding even more black boxes on top of black boxes. So I have no idea what's going on or why things are happening the way they are. There are random errors in the console because some black boxes don't like other black boxes, and predictably, the editor crashed on me more than once. At the end of the week I was completely exhausted.

So yeah. Not going back there any time soon. I haven't decided what to do for next week, but I started compiling a list of themes and ideas in my bullet journal, and I have at least a year worth of garbage in there. Expect something at least interestingly terrible.