ShoeCraft was a failure to properly think about a game idea before implementing it.
Initial Idea
The initial idea was to have the player operate a shoemaker's shop. Customers would enter the shop, tell their preference (potentially with chat bubbles containing icons representing shoe preference like light/heavy, cold/hot, etc.). The player would build the shoe and then give it to the customer, earning money. The customers would leave 5-star reviews based on their satisfaction, which would influence the rate of new customers. Different customers would have different foot shape, leading to different difficulty. E.g. cat (simple foot), chicken, monkey etc.
What went wrong
This seemed to me like a doable scope for a Jam game. Everything happens into a single room, only need to model 1 room, a couple of tools and some characters for customers. What I failed to consider was the process of making shoes. I somewhat had in mind that the player would draw around the foot of the customer, then cut the leather sheet for the sole and then assemble a shoe. Except every single of these steps are quite complicated. For drawing, I figured out how to use bevy decals to allow drawing onto surfaces. For cutting I saved the cuts into a list of cuts and then generated a polygon from graph traversal which I then used to generate the cut mesh. Finally for assembly, I didn't have the time to implement it.
Emergence
Essentially all these steps of the shoe making process were costly to implement. They also had 0 emergence. Therefore the player experience was very linear. You simply do the steps of drawing and then cutting and the way you completed these steps had little relevance at all. Perhaps if the way the shoe was shaped had impact on customer satisfaction it could have, but I was way too far away from implementing customer satisfaction, I could not even complete the show assembly step in 72 hours.
Fun
It was far from fun either. Just having to go through the game in order to debug the code for the assembly phase was extremely tedious. I was increasingly frustrated with my game and as a result lost all motivation to finish it. If I don't enjoy my game, who will? This is neither a realistic shoe making simulation, nor is it a gamified or fun one.
Conclusion
In the end, I had good time learning to use blender. This was my first time making a 3D character with animations and I like the cat I made. I also had fun texturing the shop with pictures I tool in my apartment. I also hope to learn from my mistake and do other jams with more strategic ideas.
