Post-Mortem: 42 Pillars of Stone

The game if you want to check it out

This is a post mortem of my entry into LD42: Running out of Space

Being my first game-jam I was very nervous the night before, I stocked up on food and drinks and got a good nights sleep before the jam (7:30am start in Adelaide AU).

I haven't used Unity other than doing some tutorials, and stuffing around with Roll-a-Ball. But I think C# is my strongest language, and I can work in it without much trouble.

I hadn't done any planning with any of the final themes, I thought it was more thematic to just go at it after the theme was announced (Too many themes in that sentence?).

I knew it was going to be rough because I had an early start Monday morning, which meant I lost out on ~10hrs of potential jamming... I was sweating bullets before the jam had even started.

So I woke up Sat morning and made sure everything was setup and ready.

The theme was announced, and I got to work. I knew I wanted a top-down Gauntlet-style game that I could keep to one screen. The main take-away from reading how to prepare was 'Scope to the lowest possible level'.

What went right

• I got a game done in the time-frame: This was my main concern, I thought I'd get to the finish line with nothing but a handful of dirt and a few lines of code. I'm happy I was able to compete in my first game-jam and get something over the line.

• Sound effects and Music: If there's one thing I need in a game it's music and sound effects. My game may have had some bugs, but I would leave it the way it is if fixing the bugs meant no music/sound effects.

• Coding on the fly: The main reason I wanted to do a game-jam was to see if I had the chops to code a game over a weekend. Mission accomplished.

• Title Screen and Ending Screens: Whilst my game art was 'interesting', for lack of a better word. I'm happy I was able to include a few screens to break the monotony of the game window.

• My Idea: True, it pretty much went with the first thing that came into my head. It wasn't original, it didn't break the mold and introduce anything revolutionary, but I liked my idea and I think I achieved a lot of what I wanted.

What went wrong

• Time: I knew from the start I'd be 10hrs down, and I think this hurt me the most. I couldn't fix, build, play-test, iterate as much as I wanted. This meant the bugs were plenty, and their fixes were me saying "that SHOULD work", while it worked a lot, I shouldn't have relied on it. This also hurt me a lot in regards to polish, feature cutting, balance issues, graphics, and User Experience.

• Title Button: Should have taken the title-button out, it bricked any replays but I left it in because I'm stubborn and threw some bad code at it to try and make it go away 10 minutes before I uploaded the game. I didn't even test to see if it worked #yolo.

• Learning bread-and-butter Unity features during the jam: Mouse-Look, Canvas UI, Rigid-Bodies, Audio, Animation. These are things I had no-idea to very-little clue on, I spent a lot of time learning how to use these Unity features during the jam and I advise everyone to never do this, it was stressful and wasted a lot of time. I know them now, but man, I wish I had a better understanding beforehand.

What I could improve

• Balance / Variation: My game fell short in the balance and variation areas, I had a different leveling system but took it out last minute as it was too broken.

• Squash the Bugs: Yeah, I knew I'd have some. Would loved to have polished it a lot more, this comes from knowing the tools better I suppose.

• Take time off work: This hurt me, I was stuffed for work and was still wishing I could work on my entry. Will book the next one off.

• Graphics and Sound: Notification of being hit, Attack animations, darker sounds etc. Things I wish I had done but didn't. I also want to improve my art skills so I can make something that looks a bit better than what I had in my entry.

Conclusion

I love my game, it's ugly, doesn't have much too it, bugs out when you look at it the wrong way, but it's mine and I wouldn't change it for anything. Yes, there's a lot I wish wasn't there but at the end of the day my goal was to put an entry into LD and I did.

I've learnt a lot, received a lot of really good feedback, had a lot of fun and got to enter LD42! That's all I wanted, I got it, I'm happy.

I want to thank everyone that played my game, and left me feedback. I hope you all had fun, learnt something new and are keen for LD43! I know I am