Airport Anarchy

Here I stand at baggage claim. I’m not joking, literally writing this at baggage claim in an airport waiting eternally for a single god forsaken bag. I’m in purgatory. I have been traveling for twelve hours. I’m 30 minutes away from seeing my family and friends and the endless flow of luggage holds me captive. And that’s exactly what this game is about: the maliciously designed process of escaping an airport with your sanity.

I do this dance with the conveyor often, and so I know it well. The first bag always comes quickly. False hope is more painful than no hope at all. So they start you with the dream of leaving after a reasonable period of waiting. This is never the case.

The second tends to be  more fickle in nature, appearing whenever it can be bothered. Sometimes it arrives in tandem with the first, others it will wait until your just about ready to report it as lost before popping up. 

The final bag however, that’s when they put the thumb screws on. There will be a minimum of 1000 bags near identical to yours before your actual bag finally surfaces. And once you finally have all your bags corralled, you may begin the task of loading them all onto a comically minuscule trolley. 

Designing this game was an interesting expire as everything I expected to pose a challenge was trivial and everything I hoped to be simple proved needlessly complex. For example the spawner and conveyor were quite easy to implement,  as were the timers on the bag's instantiations. Even my pick up functions were doable,  with enough time and effort. But simply making a guitar case that didn’t look like a series of circles and squares glued together with reckless abandon proved to be a near insurmountable task. Fixing my pick up function so a bag in your hand wouldn't be whisked away by the conveyor took an embarrassing length of time. So I suppose I learnt that game dev is sporadic and tortuous as baggage claim, with an equally gratifying feeling at its end. This project was most successful in teaching me the importance of good work flow and not having to drag folder to folder to unity to slot every time I want to import something simple.