Gem Quest Demo Development

I began development on 'Gem Quest' in August 2023, where I spent 3 days midday to midnight finding assets that I could use online, then creating an unreal project where I spent the remainder of the 3 days making whatever mechanics I could think of; Implementing a main menu, allowing the player to select their characters' design as well as their props' design, creating a dungeon with the modular assets I had imported and setting up the game instance, variables and character movement. I did all this under the challenge of not using any online tutorials, which I.. mostly succeeded at.

Then after a few days where I was busy, I started my course at college and didn't have the time to apply to the project. That was until somewhere around March of 2024, there was maybe 2 or 3 lessons where we were able to work on whatever projects we wanted, so I created a to-do list on my phone where I decided their would be 7 levels, and decided to increase the difficulty in each level by including a new mechanic in each one, with the final one using all of the mechanics in a more challenging layout. So I then loaded up my project in unreal and spent those few lessons developing the mechanics for each level and touching up the original mechanics I had already made in 2023. I made the trapdoors, spikes, made it possible to collect the gems, and made the layout for the first level before revisiting the character movement and level instance.

It wasn't until July 2024 when I continued development, as a final piece of work for the college year we were tasked with updating an old piece of work to show off to visitors of the college; I took this opportunity to work on what was at the time called 'wizardgame' until I could call it a demo, a name, 2 levels, a timer, and a score mechanic were my goals.

My first course of action was coming up with a name, I struggled with this until I came up with the story of a wizard who fell on hard times and had to go on a quest to find riches, a quest to find gems, 'Gem Quest'. Then I had the challenge of making the second level, It took a while but I came up with a design I was happy with that included and highlighted the mechanic of moving platforms. Next, the timer, I played the levels a bunch of times in different ways finding the fastest route I could manage with the knowledge of where the gems were and added 10 seconds to the fastest time for the normal difficulty and and extra 20 for the easy difficulty, then I made it so running out of time would save the amount of gems you got and load the next level. Finally, my nightmare arrived, it was time for the scoreboard; Just figuring out a score mechanic was tough enough but displaying it in a certain position with an inputted 3 character long name might just have took years off my life.

The demo was finally completed, the night before the deadline, I sent it off and went to the college event the next day. All seemed fine, not a single bug, until my Mam played the game, where she showed me the one and only bug I know of to this day; the player is able to play so poorly that they could get a negative score.