What went well:
- Team work. From initial concept to submitted entry, we worked democratically, pulled our weight and got along. I couldn't ask for better teammates!
- Art. The art looks beautiful and suits the concept perfectly. Out of the reviews we've received so far it is probably the most frequently complimented part of the game.
- Mechanics. It might not seem it but there is a lot going on mechanics wise with this game. To list a few, we had to design, code and implement: three different sets of Enemy AI; two types of player movement; collision-conditional jumping; a role-switching power up; one-way platform collisions; and a bunch of others. We did a really good job of getting pretty much all our designed ideas into the finished thing.
What went not-so well:
- Version control. Our version control, on the coding front, was to package up our Unity projects and merge them together at sensible intervals. If I did it again I would get a github set up so we could make changes to files without having to worry that we were branching off from each other too much.
- Balancing, testing. Our targeted concept and design was so feature-rich that it took until about 5 minutes before the submission deadline to merge the project into something we could submit. This left no time whatsoever to play-test and tweak the balance of various things like jumping and movement.
- Workflow. Next time I would work in a more agile manner and aim to get a playable game sooner during the course of the jam and then expand on it in sprints, rather than working on a large base of features and merging at the last minute.
What I learnt (so, so much):
- Code cleanly. Think before you code. I had to waste time going back and re-designing my methods later in the project when they weren't portable or modular enough to merge with other features. In future I would avoid making direct reference to anything like a tag or an object without setting it as a public variable first, and I will avoid using || to cheaply cover possible eventualities.
- Basically everything I know about Unity and C#. More than anything, this game taught me a lot about the things that are possible in Unity and ways to go about them. I'm a long ways off of even an amateur level but I now have the skills and knowhow to realise a lot of my ideas, even with my noon-level grasp.
- Inspiration. Other Rob and I came up with A LOT of nifty scripts for a range of different mechanics, each of which could be spun off and expanded into different games. I'm full of ideas for how I can build on what we achieved during the jam and implement it in future projects.
Overall, I've come away from the jam very enthused about continuing to make games. Thanks to all my team members, especially to Rob for giving me the opportunity!
Check out some test builds I uploaded over the course of the jam:
Test2
Test3
Test5
Test6
The first build with sound
Are you "code" for sexy. tee hee
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