Towards Summer 2016, I began to realize that my Cleaning game was all style and no substance.

I had spent so much time perfecting animations and artwork, but completely ignored game mechanics, or anything that would make the experience entertaining gameplay-wise. As a result, I made the decision to completely reboot the project, dropping SceneKit in favour of something more prototype-friendly: Unity.

From an empty canvas, the original concept evolved quickly. The first change was to characters: Whereas originally you controlled a single bot, controlling a small swarm instead was more entertaining, and flexible as a mechanic. In an effort to not get distracted by aesthetics whatsoever, I stuck solely to primitive geometry for a while.

Only a week later, I had a prototype which demonstrated bots (represented by gray boxes below) expressing preference for “cleanable” objects (cyan boxes), and properly redistributing themselves according to workload. I strongly feel this exercise would have taken far more time with Apple’s immature game tools.

For all of June, I spent time building basic pathfinding so the bots wouldn’t bump into each other. What I thought would be a simple task, ended up requiring far more complexity than I anticipated (ie. A*), and towards the end, I finally decided to adopt Unity’s builtin Navmesh system instead.

Snapshots taken along the way helped document progress: