Horsing Around Devlog.

Horsing Around

Horsing Around is a horse themed trivia maze game. Your objective is to make it all the way through the maze and reach the bale of hay at the end before time runs out and you starve to death!

This game initially started as just a basic trivia game, as I was inspired by my airplane trip to Europe that had a trivia game for me to entertain myself with. I thought that a trivia game would be 100% reasonable for me to make, and I also enjoy getting to research random fun facts.

Originally my plan was to have categories that the game would randomly choose from. But they would just be random categories of oddly specific things I know an absurd amount of knowledge about. And the player is then asked a question from that category and must pick the right answer as fast as possible to get the most amount of points.

However I was given feedback that it might be more interesting to add more elements to the trivia. Not just question and answer and move on to the next one.

So then I was inspired by a maze I did once a few years ago. Where you would go through the maze and there would be a sign with a question on it, and a few different options for answers. The correct answer would take you on the right path, the wrong answers would lead you off.

I decided to implement that into my game, and make a trivia maze. 

I then decided I needed to narrow down a theme. I still wanted to do a theme that is very me. So I decided to do a horse themed maze. Because I already knew a lot about horses. And secondly it was pretty easy to find free assets that I could build the maze out of and make it farm themed. (except ironically the asset pack didn’t have a horse so I had to use a good ol’ PNG.)

So then I started making the maze and I did also do research in addition to using my own horse knowledge. And that all went according to plan.

But then once I had the maze and questions done I had to add more urgency to it. At that time, if the player picked the wrong answer it would just take them on a longer path, but there was no real punishment for making the wrong choice. So I decided to add a timer, the longer paths would cause the player to take longer to reach the end of the maze increasing the possibility of running out of time. This way there was actual punishment for picking the wrong choice in a way.

Then I just decided to contextualize the timer to the horse that the player plays as, as starvation. 

I had to reconsider the amount of time I would give the player a few times, as I wanted to give enough time for the player to not be super rushed but also not so much time that the timer is pointless.

It really helped having others play through the maze to determine how much time I should have on the timer.