So Trampoline Cop is out there and I’ll discuss my thoughts on it.

What went right:

I love the hell out of my little cartoon car and crook. I’m starting to feel confident in my blender modeling. I like how the car controls. I like the overall look of everything.

What went wrong:

I vastly underestimated the scale of the city I was trying to construct, especially when it needs to be designed to accommodate two very different types of movement (Trampoline Cop’s ability to jump over buildings vs. the crook’s need to go around.) So the gameplay suffers from that, there are some dead ends that if I had more time to tweak should have had trampolines.

The crooks are just using the Unity Nav Mesh Agent for movement. It was maybe a good approach with the time limit, so I didn’t program it from scratch, but I wasn’t that familiar with using it, and it added complexity to developing the map, since they kept finding ways to squeeze through that I didn’t want. (And just increasing their radius wasn’t an option if I wanted them to fit through the door of the hideout.)

What I would change, given more time:

Like I said, the map needs a lot of tweaking and balancing with playthroughs and deciding where to put trampolines, and blocking the crooks’ shortcuts. Plus visually I need to vary the buildings a litte more, and add additional decorations like street signs and lamp posts.

A quicker change but worth it is I need Da Chief to keep track of batches of crooks. So instead of getting a series of “Crooks got away!” he’d just wait until the batch is complete and say “Four crooks got away!”

Something I had been thinking of orginally but dropped for time: I wanted there to be a bunch of different stores that the crooks are robbing, instead of the one generic Bank. Then when a robbery occurs, you get a message from Da Chief that “The KFC has been robbed!” or whatever. (KFC as an example because of Crazy Taxi influence.) Which once you’ve learned the map helps you know how far away the crooks are when they’re outside the range of your minimap.