Sorta Sorting (unfinished)

Description and Controls:

Get through the laundry pile before time runs out!

Use the mouse to drag the top laundry item to the correct pile...while your mom is watching.

When she's not, mash SPACE to throw the next laundry item into a random pile!

Sorta Sorting is about slacking off for the sake of getting an otherwise impossible task done.  I sometimes find that I have to cut something or shirk on an aspect of a project that I am working on just to get something submittable in on time, and while frustrating, it is sometimes necessary to scale back or de-scope. While cheating like in Sorta Sorting isn't necessarily the answer in real life, I wanted to capture the feeling of facing a literally impossible task, and having to adapt where you can to work around it.

The initial idea for this game came out of (believe it or not) a very large load of laundry I had to do that needed to be sorted before being washed. In order to not hog the machines from my roommates for the whole night, I had to group some of the clothes together that I would be fine with washing together even if they weren't ideal. I thought that my roommates might judge me for throwing some of the stuff together like I had, but they didn't care and kind of just laughed along at the situation. But then I thought about what would happen if they did care, or if they were replaced with someone who did, like my mom (hi mom). I figured it would be an interesting conceit to have to sneakily cheat at such a mundane, day-to-day task such as laundry and make something that boring sort of "high-stakes".  As I developed the idea and the game itself, I decided that the mom character should move back and forth to afford the player enough time to get some good cheating in, and that the stack should be randomized each round so that you couldn't just memorize a pattern.

A challenge that I faced was implementing the main mouse drag and drop functionality. I had a bit of experience with raycasting in 3D Unity, but not in 2D. In order to get the dragging and dropping to work as well as the selectability of the laundry, I needed to learn the syntax for 2D raycasting again. The lecture helped, but I still had a lot of trouble implementing the functionality. Eventually I ended up being able to circumvent some of the issues I was having with the code by creating a bunch of booleans and using them to manage when the player could click on the laundry, what they were clicking, and if they could drag the object. However, it turns out that after doing all of this myself with raycasting, Unity has a much easier method of doing drag and drop, so much so, that the example code I found in a tutorial was only about 10 lines long! At first it was frustrating to have spent several hours on something that could be coded out in 5 minutes, but I realized that I had a better understanding of 2D raycasts generally than if I had just found and done the easier method immediately. Even though it was incredibly frustrating during the process, overall, I found the struggle a useful experience.