Smolder's Smithery is a VR project created in Unity for the Game Development Workshop course in my 4th year of university. Starting with a small team of 4 and a short development cycle of two and a half months, the team decided we wanted to make something that we could quickly build over a weekend to determine if it was fun. After a few hours of ideation and workshopping, we came upon a simple blacksmith shop sim in VR. Through early playtesting, we found
players enjoyed the limited aspects of the prototype,
and they wanted more. This cemented our plan, and we got to work adding more interactions, more style and ambiance, and more comical physics interactions centered around the action of hitting an object with another object to complete a task.
I worked as the lead game designer and one of the programmers for the team. I helped to design the original prototype idea and central theme of physical bonking, adjusted Unity VR template files, create customer order importer
that creates Unity Scriptable Objects from JSON data, and to
implement feedback
from our weekly external playtests. Due to the size of the team, I wore many hats on this project, which allowed me to not only continue working as a designer but also to get deeper into the scripting work for the game than I have had the opportunity to previously.
Throughout development, we had a ton of ideas and thoughts recorded from the various playtest sessions. Due to the timeframe, we had a lot of great feedback that had to be cut in favor of higher priority features or fixes. My previous experience working on Operation Echo taught me a little bit about prioritizing feedback received, but we had
a lot more playtesters a lot more frequently
for Smolder's Smithery, which made it
hard to determine what was most important to implement.
Ultimately, we decided that our system for priority would be ensuring there is a playable core loop free of as many game-breaking bugs
as possible, followed by
quality-of-life improvements relating to VR interactions
such as moving and grabbing, to finally be followed up by
set dressing and style.
An example of this is that we had at one point gotten feedback to add a training dummy in the center of the shop to swing the various weapons at because everyone wanted to swing their newly created sword. This ended up falling on the back burner and was not implemented because we needed to instead focus our efforts on ensuring that the molten metal pouring was bug-free.
