It has been a while since I did not make any games and it pretty gimme haunted feeling because I acknowledge my self as a game programmer but not develop any game for a while. On May I tried to make a game but it turned out that I make many mistakes in that game so it did not go well and I abandon the project because it was too complicated for me and I not a fan or even play any zen game.
It was already June I decided to make another game that fits with my own skill and can be finished in a month. I come up with some ideas but most of them have a small-medium scale and I do not find what’s good with that idea. And I decide to take a look at the weekly game jam theme that is “Shelter”. I tried to think about shelter and find out what is that mean in google translate, is that word has other meaning. And come up with an idea about shelter for number, Where I want the player to input the correct number based on the rule on that level. At last, the game is changed it turned out to be a puzzle game about the logic gate. Pretty simple and luckily I managed to finish it, although it’s not pretty polished.
What went right?
- I found that has a limitation (e.g theme) will help you find a good game idea.
- I added “Work on my project at least an hour” to my habit tracker and it reminds me each day so I can spare my time.
- I break down my game task into a smaller chunk and added it into sprint table in notion. So I can now what I needed to do today, how many tasks left and how many tasks I had done.
- I finished the game, this pretty gives me more confidence because I finish a game after a few times failed to finish it. So it relief my burden because of not finishing my previous game.
- Cut unnecessary feature from the game.
- Controlled my sense to develop tools when making the game.
- Used Tween, I never use tween before. But In this game, I able to learn a bit about using Tween.
What went wrong
- Got distracted by the games I bought recently. I use my habit tracker to solve this.
- Oversimplified the game task. I breakdown it into smaller chunk so I can manage it.
- Do not create a proper or detail level design for each level.
- Tried to find the best solution for the game mechanics problem. I should use the easiest way to solve it rather than find the best solution I want and spent my thinking while I can use the easiest one.
- And the most critical thing I forgot is always testing your game in target platform each time you change something.
- It seems, using a scriptable object in Unity is not good for WebGL, because I found it has different behaviour between the editor and the WebGL.
That’s what I learn from working on this game. If you are interesting with the game I made you can play it here and get the source code from my GitHub.
Thank you for reading till the end :) hope you enjoy it.