I decided to make an experience based on a flower shop. Users can go into the shop, select flowers they like, make a bouquet, and buy flowers. I also want to implement a money system such that you need to purchase everything within the budget, and if you go over the budget, you can’t buy the bouquet. Right now, I’ve implemented being able to walk in and out of the store using a door (enter) and rug (exit), being able to select the flower stand and select flowers you like from a menu into your cart, and going to the checkout. I want to draw all the images, backgrounds, and items in this experience, but right now, I just simple stand-in pictures I drew. I’ll replace these shabby ones in the future, but I just wanted to get the mechanisms of my system working before beautifying it.
Jotting down ideas before starting:
Lots of things ended up changing. I originally wanted to make everything pixel art too, but I think I’m gonna stick with more a freeform style.
Fear:
I had a lot of difficulty displaying and un-displaying different elements in the project. For example, I have a hover effect I’m proud of as it helps indicate what’s clickable to users. However, that means turning things on and off in terms of displaying them, which is a lot more complicated to implement than it intuitively feels to use. I knew I was gonna spend a lot of time figuring out how these mechanisms were gonna work, so I wanted to start early on these instead of the visual sophistication of the project. That’s why I created really simple sketches and blobs to fill in the final drawings.
I’m also not sure if I want to implement a budget; the minimum viable product should be being able to make a bouquet with flowers you chose without worrying about the money, but it’d be nice to have. Having these milestones is important because then you feel less overwhelmed. Each tiny detail can take a long time to implement, so it can feel very daunting. However, I can steadily make progress through these milestones.