KAKYUUMARI Post-Mortem Thoughts
Hey everyone, NOKOI here. I'm writing this quick little blog post to summarize my thoughts on how my first Ludum Dare went for me!
The Good
This was my first time working in a team and I think it went phenomanally! I handled the programming and the brunt of the Unity parts of the game while the other team members made art assets and music. I had a blast working with everyone. Tackling the idea of making a Katamari game seemed difficult at first but I'm glad I could pull through. I learned a lot about Unity in this time, especially learning about just how useful components like the line renderer and trail renderer are. I'm glad to have had this chance to learn more about this engine I love using and I'm excited to work on new projects. Seeing all of our separate work come together into one big project was a joy for me. I hope to work with this group of talented creators again for more projects. Who knows, maybe we have more on the way? :smile:
The Bad
While developing the game, we decided to use Github. Big mistake. Not many of us even knew what we were doing with Github and we almost missed the deadline because of a bad merge, causing panic in the final hours of the game jam. We plan to learn Github a little more so we don't make the same mistake. Luckily, I recovered the project file, but it was almost too late and very stressful for me. There's this nasty bug with the camera that I don't know how to fix. Whenever the character moves, the camera freaks out and rapidly moves side to side. I hope it wasn't too noticeable and I'm probably going to create a better camera in my next game. It was my first time trying to make a mouse controlled anything in Unity but I'm pretty happy with what I did make in the limited time. The saddest loss due to time was that we couldn't implement dynamic music. We had a whole thing planned where the song would have more layers based on the ball size but that never came to fruition. Instead, the whole song plays and I limited the timer to the length of the song to simulate this effect.
Conclusion
I'm really happy that I entered a game jam and got to work with the talented people I did. It also luckily coincided with my school vacation so I got to work all throughout Monday to finalize our game. I hope this was a fun little read and that you'll be inspired to try out our game, KAKYUUMARI. Me and the rest of the team will be playing all the other games we see too. Hope everyone has a nice day!
- NOKOI
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/kakyuumari