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The title of the game is called the descent, and oh boy known issues is a long list, but before that I would like to get into the credits for the game.

I would like to thank: Unity for being a usable game engine sometimes

Unity for being built on spaghetti code and so un memory safe that when forced to be memory safe it dies

Unity for building my projects and having them play entirely different to when they were in the editor. Wayland, for making my unity experience hell.

Piskel, for not making exporting as png default and making there be confusion with my partner on how to send me her art

Chatgpt for occasionally helping me bugfix unity but more often gaslighting me and forcing me to use the unity forums instead for half decent advice.

The popos development team, for not having addressed the bug report I put in a year ago mentioning that its not currently possible to change the desktop environment despite giving you the option to do so in the settings menu without completely borking anything graphical.

A special thanks to: Akihito Tsukushi: for made in abyss, which the art is much much more than just heavily inspired by.

Ivana Aguilar: For the art

James Morgan: for being understanding about linux hating unity and also hopefully accepting my posts here late Nam Nguyen: for being a lifesaver and building my game on his windows machine when my unity was dead. NOW FOR SOME ISSUES

I didnt have time to properly cage in the player, nor request some OOB art, so the player is capable of just jumping into the infinite blue nothing. There is supposed to be a survival timer but it does not show up on the itch upload of the game. Movement needs more polish Enemy AI, whats that, more like enemy Pythagorean theorem *dies laughing* I did not have energy to also port over win function from the earlier prototype so that does not exist

Oh god there is so much to talk about but I will try and make this short, as it exists now the game is a platformers with enemies that try and follow the player while damaging, them, there is a health bar, a dash, a jump, double jump, and a game over screen. Overall I am happy that something WORKS, and I would be lying if I said I was not dissapointed with what there is now, I feel like there could have been ALOT more done in the time I had if instead of troubleshooting I actually got to do game dev. As for getting here from the last alpha, I had wanted to remake the game world and just copy paste the scripts etc over, but that didnt work, so i ended up completely remaking the game and encounetering a veritable smorgasboarg of issues while doing so, almost none of which were with actually doing game dev and almost all of which were with unity being a piece of poop not memory safe piece of software that gets angry when you dont let it write to places it shouldnt. Overall there core game loop exists and works but all of the polish I was hoping to try and add only exists in my imagination. HERE IS A LINK TO THE GAME

I will be talking about 3 games in this blog post, namely https://alexisroyce.itch.io/may-i-take-your-order

https://itch.io/queue/c/5739085/spring-2025-games-108?game_id=3126631&password=

And https://adamatomic.itch.io/mole-mole

My game is a territory control capture the point game, where players can choose to spawn or move pieces in addition to making obstacles in order to slowly further their goal of getting 3 pieces into the enemy base. The detailed rules are as follows

For my First play session, I played against my younger brother, where rule 4 was refined to allow pieces to be super pieces after reaching the enemy base and rules 5 and 6 were added, this game didn't end up ending as we didn't have enough time to play the game to completion, but it was somewhat enjoyable thought I was feeling somewhat limited in the way strategies could form and walls seemed way to strong. This is also a theme throughout but some way to better manage spawning new pieces as opposed to moving them should probably be implemented. For my second play session i played with my girlfreind and this was a bit quicker with the game actually ending this time (to my very smug victory) where rules 7 and 8 were added to give some more movement options, and rule 3 was modified and expanded to limit walls. This gave me alot of hope for the game as it was quite fun to play though the win I had felt somewhat cheesy and this will be echoed in play session 3. For my 3rd play session I played in class with another student where rules 9 and 10 were added, as without rule 9 it seemed basically impossible to approach the bases, and rule 10 capping the number of pieces seemed like it would force some more limitations on players and prevent cheese while also making the treasure chests more valuable. More play tests are for sure needed and a better written and clarified version fo the rules would be nice as well. The core mechanic for this game is grid movement with pieces as the map, as the core strategy involves setting up walls to move your pieces quickly towards the enemy base without allowing them to be used as walls by your opponent, especially since only the top piece on a wall can be used in a slide. I don't have pictures for each version of my board game as the only changes were the rules being fleshed out and the map staying relatively the same. But I do want to take some time in order to talk about how I designed the board.

This week we played some card games as a group, notably we played crazy 8s and bullshit, both games were kind of interesting, but of the two bullshit was definitely the more board gamey experience, as there was significantly more decision making than there was in crazy 8s. With the ability to bluff being a massive boon in terms of making the game feel like there was a real element of strategy too it. Overall it was a pretty fun experience to play these games with group mates, and the lecture before hand really got me thinking about how board game design for things like this can have a massive implication on how the way giving players agency affects the fun of a game. Here is a quick image from our game of bullshit.

This is the session report of our game.

Hodo plays one 2, nobody contests

Ivana plays one 3, nobody contests

Rome plays three 4s, nobody contests

Ethan plays one 5, nobody contests

Nam plays one 5, nobody contests

Rosemarie plays one 8, nobody contests

Ivana plays one 9, nobody contests

Rome plays two 10s, nam contests, Rome picks up the entire pile and gets annoyed that his genius strategy of hoping the person who called him would not check the authenticity of both cards did not work, he vows to call out nam every time

Ethan plays one 10, nobody contests

 Nam plays a queen its bullshited

Rosemarie plays a king it is not contested

Hodo plays an ace it is contested

Rome plays 3 2s not contested

Ethan plays one 3 nam contests, ethan takes pile

Nam plays 1 4 rome contests

Next player plays a 5 nam contests

Rosemarie plays one 6 no contest

Hodo plays 2 7s nobody contests

Rome plays 1 8, name contests and takes the pile

Ethan plays 1 9 nobody contests

Nam plays 1 10 rome contests, rome takes the pile, nam finds it increasingly funny that rome has given up on winning and has the sole goal of making nam loose

Rosemarie 1 queen

Hodo 1 king

Rome 2 aces

Ethan plays 2 2

Nam plays 1 3 rome contests and takes pile

One 4 is played

Rosemarie plays a 5 nam calls

Ivana plays a 6

Rome plays 3 7s

Ethan plays 1 8 nam contests, nam takes the pile

Nam plays 1 9 rome contests

Rosemarie plays 1 jack

 Ivana plays 1 queen, rome comments he has all four jacks

 Rome plays 3 kings

Ethan plays 1 ace nam calls, ethan takes pile

Nam plays 1 2 rome calls 

Rome plays 1 3

Rosemarie plays 1 4

Ivana plays 1 5

Rome plays 3 6s it gets called rome takes pile

Ethan plays 1 7 nam calls him, nam takes his 7

Nam plays 3 aces, rome calls and takes the aces

Ivana plays 1 10

Hodo plays 1 jack nam calls it

Rome plays 15 queens, after much deliberation, rosemarie calls it, and somehow rome does not have 15 queens’

Ethan plays 1 king

Nam plays 1 ace rome calls it

Rosemarie plays 1 3

Hodo plays 1 4

Rome plays 1 5

Ethan plays 1 6 

I chose to play tetris, namely because I dabble in competitive tetris and have managed to get to the game crash screen a few times. I managed to get to about level 18 before the extra floaty controls made it impossible for me to properly stack my pieces and I died after miss dropping a square piece. It definitely did take a little bit to get used to the different feel of the controls as compared to what I am used to in NES tetris, though the slow ramp up of tetris let me get used to it enough. The game itself has different music and backgrounds than the nes version and the rotate button did not allow for left and right rotation only right rotation. The controls were certainly less responsive on the website than they would be in an emulator or on the NES I typically play on, the only acceptable play style also seems to be DAS(delayed auto shift), with not option for hyper tapping or rolling to speak of (even though I have rapid trigger enabled on a hall effect keyboard). To me aside from that it seems to be a fairly faithful recreation of the arcade game as there isn't even a bag system to ensure that you don't end up just never getting a line piece which was only implemented as standard after the original couple of tetris games. I did not play enough of it to be able to see if the glitch colors still exist or even if they exist at all in this version (they likely do) as frankly playing past level 29 with DAS seems impossible to me, though even if I was good at the DAS play style even the best of the best DAS players likely can't survive long past 29. Overall I had a pretty good time playing through the arcade version of tetris and it was interesting to compare it to the NES tetris I play so much.

Tetris Game on the simulator