It's done! My first ever game jam, first ever game built with unity (or any engine for that matter), as well as many other firsts, and I'm exhausted. After spending the first few hours of the jam still fumbling through bought but lightly used Udemy courses in unity, trying to figure out how I'd implement some basic mechanics, I'm somewhat shocked I managed to get something done on time. It's no masterpiece but it's something.

The unity project started out as something reasonable but quickly morphed into a spaghetti monster that if hunted would provide enough to feed the whole of Italy for a month. Drag and drop components into various script fields, access variables across objects like everybody's variable belongs to everybody (comrade), but in the end it all somehow kinda works.

Made fairly heavy use of UI components without really having any ideea how they work and it almost got me in the end. Had my Game view setup to the ludum dare embed resolution the whole weekend only to find out about 20 minutes into the submission hour that a bunch of stuff no longer aligns on any resolution not exactly matching that resolution (and the embedding does not enforce anything). Thankfully managed to fiddle with the project settings enough to generate a build with the specific LD resolution constraint and no webgl full screen bar. The Simpson back fat meme is real.

While I was fully aware of how you must always reduce your scope cuz you aint gonna have the time, looking back on my original feature list, it's amazing how much I thought I could get done. I've never drawn a tile map before in my life and yet here I was planning a city level with buildings, and sidewalks, and hey if I have some extra time maybe some lightning for a cyber punk aesthetic. Yea right.

The jam theme was something I hated on Friday. It seemed gimmicky and not my kind of thing. I figured I would just do something random and ignore the theme. Forced myself however to try and think of something and in the end I'm quite happy with the direction it took me. We're flooded with information, notifications, subscriptions, pop-ups, etc, and I liked trying to shine a light on this ideea of overstimulation by taking it to the extreme. Even managed to get some kind of story out of it. Nothing I'd take to her parents of course, but something that could potentially grow.

Finally, this concept of over digitalisation reminded me of a mural I've seen in a tube station in Bucharest. I've pictured it above. Below is my derivative work built on top of my 16px character:

A classic case of Tinder Profile vs IRL.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/51/aberration