Cold Turkey was a school project for my game engine class. We were given the theme of "New Beginnings" and tasked with building a full game as a team of four. After some brainstorming we landed on the idea of someone recovering from addiction, which is obviously a darker subject, but we leaned into making it lighthearted by framing it around candy. The player is getting over their candy addiction by giving away their entire stock to customers in one go, hence the name Cold Turkey. It ended up being a fun concept that kept the theme intact without taking itself too seriously.
My role on the team was main technical developer, so everything on the programming side fell to me. I'll be honest, going into it I wasn't really treating this as a learning experience. It was more just get it done, get the grade, move on. And looking back, that mindset showed. I didn't get nearly as much out of it as I could have.
That said, the inventory system ended up being more of a challenge than I expected. In hindsight it's not that complicated, but at the time it pushed me to actually think through problems in a more structured way, and I came out of it with a better instinct for breaking down systems before writing a single line of code. My teacher also introduced us to SOLID principles and better programming practices specific to game development, which quietly stuck with me more than I realized at the time. Those are things I still think about now.